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Pragmatic Criticism: Women and Femininity in the Inauguration of Academic English Studies in the U.K., 1900-1950

Natalie Francesca Wright

Ph.D. University of Sussex August 2020

2

I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be, submitted in whole or in part to another University for the award of any other degree.

Signature: ……………………………………… 3

University of Sussex

Natalie Francesca Wright

Doctorate of Philosophy

Pragmatic Criticism: Women and Femininity in the Inauguration of Academic English Studies in the U.K., 1900-1950

This project looks at how gender operates in literary-critical values during the formation of U.K. English departments in the early twentieth century through the lives and work of three pioneering women scholars: Edith Morley, Caroline Spurgeon, and Q. D. Leavis. It argues that academic literary studies inculcated masculine critical rhetoric into the discipline, revolving around the conceptual pillars of stoicism, seriousness, and hard work, and that this rhetoric had a material impact on early women scholars. This project finds that these three women did not uphold the emerging critical paradigm, however, but that they produced work concerned with writers’ personal lives, socio-political contexts, and readerly emotion. In chapter one, I find that academia discriminates against Morley and Leavis using a gendered professional lexicon and that, correspondingly, these women are highly politicized workers with pioneer mentalities. In chapter two, I find that early male scholars use scientific discourse to promote unemotional and impersonal criticism as internal intellectual virtues. On the contrary, I find that Morley, Spurgeon, and Leavis perceive critical bias as a methodological issue and understate their own agency in their statistical work. In chapter three, I find that Spurgeon and Leavis represent collegiate environments using queer codes and tropes and respond to other writers’ representations of university life with paranoid criticism. In chapter four, I find that Morley and Spurgeon appreciate women novelists for representing feminine subject matter, whereas Leavis argues that they are valuable because they are serious and hard-working. My research interweaves textual analysis and material social history, using personal and institutional archives, life-writing, and published criticism. This project intervenes in the history of literary studies as it the first to look at early women scholars’ work in tandem or at gender ideology in literary-critical discourse in their era, and it is the first project to narrate the birth of the discipline as it was experienced by women. 4

Contents

List of Figures 5

Acknowledgements 6

Introduction: Gender in Early Academic Literary Studies 7 Women in Early Literary Studies 9 Three Pioneers 14 Women and Femininity 22 Existing Scholarship 27 Methodologies 35 Chapter Summaries 38

Chapter One: Rogue Professionals: Gender in Academic Literary Labours 42 Professionalism, Or…? 42 A Soft Subject 48 A Rogue Professor 52 A Profession So Arduous 56 The One Great Profession 60 The Partnership Principle 66 Pioneer Politics 69 Doubly Feminised 73

Chapter Two: Assays of Bias: Women’s Literary Statistics and Sociologies 75 Objective Criteria 75 A Personal Count 82 Images and Bodies 94 Biographical Sociology 99 Literary Anthropology 106 Partial Objectivity 114

Chapter Three: The Room Behind the Mind: Queer Collegiate Reading 116 Women in College 116 The Room is a Shrine 122 Crypto-lesbian Affections 129 An Academic Literary Taste 134 An Exceptionally Valuable Center of Hospitality 143 A Place That Alters All One’s Values 153

Chapter Four: Jane Austen, Miracle-worker: Women Canonising Novels 155 Raising Novels to the Level of Art 155 The Half-forgotten Sentimental Novel 159 The Nature of a Miracle 165 Trained to Reproduce 175 A Great Tradition? 181 More than a Classic 190

Conclusion: After the Pioneers 191

Bibliography 197 5

List of Figures

Figure 1: Recipe for Meatballs and Sausage Casserole on the Back of Legal Correspondence 69 Figure 2: Chart Showing Frequency of Various Themes in Shakespeare’s Imagery p. 417 88 Figure 3: Index Card Box for Edward III 89 Figure 4: Index Card Showing an Image Categorised under ‘Books’ from Richard III 89 Figure 5: Handwritten Sub-Categories of Death Imagery 90 Figure 6: Handwritten Table Counting Images in Five Plays 91 Figure 7: Letter from Caroline Spurgeon to Meta Tuke, Friday November 29 1918 151 Figure 8: Letter from Caroline Spurgeon to Meta Tuke, 21st August 1922 151 Figure 9: Spurgeon’s Abbreviations in Manuscript Draft of Shakespeare’s Imagery 152 6

Acknowledgments

My thanks go first and foremost to my supervisor, Professor Sara Crangle, who has seen me through this research over the past six years. It is difficult to count the ways in which her input has helped bring the project to completion, but I am extremely grateful for, among other things, her considered scrutiny and meticulous editorial eye, her unwavering support and conscientiousness. Dr Sam Solomon has continually gone above and beyond the remit of a secondary supervisor, reading extensive sections of my work and offering reading suggestions and stimulating discussions, especially on feminist theory and the nature of the university. Dr Natalia Cecire made incisive and clarifying comments on chapter two, to its substantial improvement. Many friends have contributed to the making of this thesis. David Miller has been a consistent source of friendship and intellectual provocation, bringing nuances to queer theory and giving extremely helpful comments on various parts of this project. Eleanor Careless has been there throughout for coffees, complaints, creeping late into poetry readings, and all kinds of literary discussions. Our reading group series in the first year of the Ph.D. germinated many of my ideas about feminism. Frith Taylor is a long-time friend and interlocutor with whom it has been delightful to share many hours and exchange anecdotes about queer literary ladies. Georgia Mulligan was a treasured lunchtime companion in the early days and read some of my work in its final form. Charlotte Terrell is another important luminary of the British Library days and offered her thoughts on the practice of reading. Katherine Parker-Hay has been a crucial support during the later stages of the PhD, particularly the period marked indelibly by the coronavirus pandemic. Other friends who deserve mention for seeing me through the past six, often difficult years are Ruth Watkinson, Ruzina Choudhury, and Abigail Williams. The participants of the Undercommons reading group in 2017 helped form many of my critiques of the university as an elite institution within the U.K.’s capitalist, cripplingly class- obsessed society. I deeply appreciate the many conversations with James Goodwin, in particular. Nat Raha introduced me to the radical possibilities of feminist historical-materialism and social reproduction theory. Halimah Manan carefully combed through chapter three. Derawan Rahmantavy kindly scrutinised chapter two. Callie Gardner generously offered comments on chapter four. I have also shared the plight and the pleasures of being a postgraduate student with Kiron Ward, Shalini Sengupta, and Alice Meyer. My counsellor, Sara Angelini, has been invaluable. Finally, I want to thank those members of my family who have patiently been there even when I have been overwhelmingly preoccupied with this project, as well as those who are no longer here, but encouraged me to read and learn in earlier years. This thesis was possible due to the financial support of a University of Sussex English Department Scholarship and a grant from the British Federation of Women Graduates. I am grateful to the McCarthy Fund for enabling a trip to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.. The project has benefitted from the kind assistance of several archivists and librarians, especially Hannah Westall at Girton College, who helped me navigate the college’s papers and its history. Q. D. Leavis’s and F. R. Leavis’s personal papers are reproduced with the permission of the Estate of Q. D. and F. R. Leavis. The English Director of Studies notebook is transcribed with the permission of the Mistress and Fellows of Girton College, Cambridge. I. A. Richards’s notebooks are transcribed by permission of the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Q. D. Leavis’s thesis and the minutes of the Faculty of English meetings are transcribed by permission of the Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of Cambridge. Edith Morley’s personal papers are transcribed with the permission of the University of Reading. 7

Introduction: Gender in Early Academic Literary Studies

It is important to remember that the growth of English as an academic subject in the twentieth century was closely bound up with the increased educational opportunities for women, since a majority of the students of the subject, and a higher proportion of its teachers than in most other disciplines, have been women. Stefan Collini, 1998

The sociology of the academic world is a sadly neglected subject. Q. D. Leavis, 1943

Once, there was a time when poetry was for dandies, novels were for ladies, and reviewing books was a gentleman’s hobby. Then, around the turn of the twentieth century, the invention of academic English studies transformed the study of literature into a thoroughly manly pursuit. Of course, gender has always inflected literary values. Some texts have been labelled epic, erudite, masculine and others frivolous, soppy, feminine. Eras are often marked by gendered associations. In the late eighteenth century, novels of manners dominated the literary scene, replete with romance and sentimentality. Many considered the Decadent movement of the late Victorian period egregiously effeminate. When literature enters the ivory tower, however, scholars begin to consider bad books and bad readers categorically feminine. The first Professor of English at Oxford, Walter Raleigh, says in 1904 that ‘[t]he eunuch was the first modern critic’ and that ‘critical admiration for what another man has written is an emotion for spinsters.’1 In 1930, Cambridge scholar William Empson argues that ‘reacting to a poem sensitively and definitely’ is ‘feminine’ and as such must be tempered by ‘masculine’ ‘indifference and ‘detachment’.2 In 1933, Empson’s colleague, F. L. Lucas, says that whereas Classics is ‘saved from the effeminacy of many aesthetic pursuits by its linguistic difficulty’, the new English course has a characteristically

1 Letter to John Sampson, 31st December 1904, Walter Raleigh, The Selected Letters of Walter Raleigh (1879-1922), ed. Lady Raleigh, (London: Methuen & Co., 1926), pp. 268-9. 2 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd edn (London: Pimlico, 2004), p. 313. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 8 feminine excessiveness: ‘like a vast continent, easy to overrun, but hard to hold’.3 Later, F. R. Leavis says that his own disinclination to be ‘diagnostically or descriptively explicit’ about writers’ lives is ‘masculine’.4 For these influential early scholars, literary value clearly has a gender. This thesis argues not only that academia changed the gender of literary values, but that early women scholars suffered the consequences. The gendering of early literary academia warrants study not only because academia has a uniquely influential position in British cultural life, able to formalise the once leisurely, lay pursuits of literature into seemingly unassailably measurable criteria, for degree classifications and for entry into the upper tiers of the class system. The gendering of early literary academia also deserves attention because at precisely the same time as British universities accept literary studies into the fold, the beginning of the twentieth century, women are making strides into academia, too. This project traces the material and intellectual effects of the rhetorical war against literary femininity on three women on the front lines: Edith Morley, Caroline Spurgeon, and Q. D. Leavis. Alongside more familiar stories of the discipline’s evolution through the birth of ‘practical criticism’ or the Oxford Movement, women are making other ambitious assays. This project looks at their tendency to write criticism that is radically political, statistical, intimately personal, deeply invested in women’s lives and that forges new collegiate literary cultures away from men. The final reason that it is important to study academia’s masculinisation of literary values is because it prevails in existing histories of the discipline. Many present the rise of the Cambridge school in particular as an inevitable ascension of critical excellence; or, as Chris Baldick says:

The remarkably inventive critical production of T. S. Eliot in the years 1917-24 had been worked up into an acceptable technique by I. A. Richards’s work of 1924-9, codified in examinations, and brilliantly exercised by Richards’s student William Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity.5

Morley’s, Spurgeon’s, and Leavis’s criticism all suggests that the masculine rhetoric of Eliot’s ‘impersonal’ poetry and Richards’s unemotional analysis was not so ‘practical’, however, for scholars who embodied femininity for the academy, whether they wanted to or not.6 In this project, I argue that these early women scholars wrote pragmatic criticism instead: criticism that

3 F. L. Lucas, ‘English Literature’, in University Studies: Cambridge, 1933, ed. by Harold Wright (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1933), p. 289. 4 Ian MacKillop, F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism (London: Allen Lane, 1995), pp. 7-8, quoting F. R. Leavis, Letter to Geoffrey Walton 25.5.75. 5 Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), p. 197. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 6 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, The Sacred Wood (London: Faber & Faber, 1920), p. 48.

9 responds to socio-political circumstances, acknowledges readers’ emotions, investigates writers’ lives, and prioritises women’s perspectives. Women’s early literary scholarship has never been studied collectively before, but when we begin to unearth it, it becomes clear that a different gendered revolution was also afoot.

Women in Early Literary Studies

The history of when and how women began studying literature at university level is extremely patchy. It is practically impossible to say when women first enrolled upon literature courses in England, because for many decades both women and literary studies had a peripheral, complicated status within the university. Historians generally consider the first official women’s college for higher education to be Girton College, which Emily Davies established in a village outside Cambridge in 1869.7 But women continued to take many routes through literary education well into the twentieth century. Carol Dyhouse has extensively documented the social factors causing women to continue to be second-class students, explaining that, in the late nineteenth century, there was a ‘dual market’ for literary studies, in which many lower-middle- class women studied to prepare for teaching, while many upper-class women studied for leisure or for the purposes of enhancing their cultural knowledge.8 Dyhouse explains that the latter group would often only take one or two courses and rarely took exams (p. 24). Until the 1930s, more women studied literature through informal networks and extra-mural organisations, such as the Ladies’ Educational Associations, than on official university courses. Even women who did enter more formal institutions, such as Girton, struggled against societal constraints in the form of curfews, quotas, chaperones, and strict rules about social interactions. Women’s journey into university English studies was thus protracted over many decades. Around the turn of the twentieth century, universities began to allow women access incrementally, letting women take courses, for example, but not sit exams, or letting them sit exams, but not awarding them degree certificates. At Oxford and Cambridge, where women had

7 For a history of Girton College by an early literary scholar, see Muriel Bradbrook, That Infidel Place: A Short History of Girton College 1869-1969 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 8 Carol Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?: Women in British universities 1870-1939 (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 23. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 10 set up separate colleges nearby, male students and staff fiercely resisted further integration.9 Student life was a stark contrast from the scenes of intellectual experimentation and emotional bildungsroman shown in men’s stories such as Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945). Newer colleges, including Reading, tended to be more receptive to women students before 1900, but they were not technically universities until later. Dyhouse mentions, for example, that one woman student, Phoebe Sheavyn, graduated with a degree in literature from the University of London in 1889 (p. 11), but it would be 1927 before an English degree was available at Cambridge University and 1948 before women there received a full qualification in the subject. Along with Oxford, who granted women full degrees in 1928, Cambridge was the last university in the U.K. to allow women equivalent privileges to men. The two ancient universities were also slow to establish English departments, initially teaching the subject within Modern Languages or historical linguistics, alongside Norse and Anglo Saxon.10 Indeed, Oxbridge was suspicious of English studies for the same reason less prestigious universities were amenable to ladies studying it leisurely: because it was still tainted with associations of amateurism. The new wave of English scholars began to see both existing forms of textual study, historical scholarship and non-academic belles-lettres, as hopelessly effeminate. Historian of Cambridge English, E. M. W. Tillyard, says, for example, that around the turn of the century, some scholars attacked the new ‘criticism paper’ for being ‘altogether too dilettante’ (p. 37). Similarly, when Cambridge finally established a separate English degree in the 1920s, many derisively referred to it as the ‘Novel-Reading Tripos’ (p. 72). In a 1922 diary entry, C. S. Lewis says that in English studies at Oxford, ‘one feels a certain amateurishness in the talk and look of the people’, because ‘women, Indians and Americans predominate’.11 Yet, at King’s College, Ladies’ Department, Lilian Faithful had been teaching literature since the 1890s.12 While there is no singular watershed moment for either women or literary studies, then, Oxford and Cambridge serve as a useful benchmark, because their conservative attitudes indicate that, if these institutions

9 In That Infidel Place, Muriel Bradbrook describes how at Cambridge in 1897, male students famously burnt effigies of women to celebrate the university voting against allowing women to receive degree certificates, (p. 99). 10 E. M. W. Tillyard explains that Cambridge University first offered English courses as part of the Modern Languages department for its first decade. See E. M. W. Tillyard, The Muse Unchained: An Intimate Account of the Revolution in English Studies at Cambridge (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1958), p. 11. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 11 Quoted in Anna Bogen, Women’s University Fiction, 1880–1945 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013), p. 136. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. Ben Knights talks about English being a ‘soft subject’ with ‘menacing fluidity’. Ben Knights, Pedagogic Criticism: Reconfiguring University English Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 11, 14. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 12 See, for example, Royal Holloway, University of London, RHC AR/130/1 Archives, Personal Papers of Caroline Spurgeon, PP7/2/20, Notes on Lectures given by Miss Faithfull, ‘The Rise and Development of the Essay’, King’s College, Michaelmas Term 1897. 11 have finally accepted the newcomers, wider social attitudes have probably already shifted. Essentially, English studies does not exist for the most prestigious universities until they have worked out ways to make it, in Tillyard’s words, ‘more strenuous and less gossipy’ (p. 69); in other words, masculine. I began this project hoping to ascertain whether women in English departments studied different books and critical methods at university to male students, but it quickly became clear that what texts either studied is not clear at all. Institutional differences, the college system, individual teachers’ preferences, and a lack of documentation all cloud the issue.13 Even confining my discussion to more well-known institutions, such as Girton, it is difficult to make confident generalisations, because records often give very little information about the day-to-day running of courses, such as syllabuses and teaching formats. Girton’s ‘Director of Studies Record Book’ for the period 1917 to 1936, for example, only lists lecture courses, which staff teach them, and details of current students.14 It is possible to see from this record, however, that the first year the English course ran, 1917-1918, one college tutor taught literary subjects (such as Victorian Novelists, Shakespeare, and Poetry) and one tutor taught linguistic fields (including Anglo Saxon, Medieval English Literature, and Historical English Language) (p. 3). We can also see that Girton borrowed a tutor from the other women’s college, Newnham, to teach Chaucer and that several men lent their services, including H. M. Chadwick to teach Norse and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch for ‘Greek & Latin in English Literature’ (p. 10). The 1917 Cambridge Reporter shows that examination questions at this time were broad: students could comment on any text from a particular time period or prolific authors such as Shakespeare.15 With teaching staff changing, too, as some took research leave and some returned, it is very difficult to say which texts made it onto the syllabus at any particular moment. Some of the richest accounts of life in early literary departments come from women who stayed on at university to become scholars. They were more likely to document their experiences in memoirs and correspondence and have their documents preserved, through university archives. Muriel Bradbrook, for example, who graduated in English from Girton College in 1929 and later became Mistress of the college, says that she ‘had come up well prepared in Shakespeare, Donne and the Romantics, but not at all prepared for the intellectual explosion of Modernist poetry and

13 As Gerald Graff points out, the ‘field coverage model’, in which staff specialisms cover a breadth of different fields and time periods, meant that many departments struggle to standardise their courses. See Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 6. 14 See Girton College Archive, GCAC 2/2/9, ‘Director of Studies in English Record Book’ Volume I (1917 - 1936), pp. 1-11. Further references to this collection are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 15 Girton College Archive, GCAC 2/2/9, Cambridge Reporter, 8 May 1917, p. 758. 12 the work of Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf’.16 In fact, perhaps more than students of any other subject on offer in the early twentieth century, women studying literature were doing what they may well have been doing at home anyway: reading. As Kate Flint explains, society had of course long warned women against the ‘indiscriminate consumption’ of literature, but women’s supposedly excessive appetite for reading meant that they were far more likely to arrive at university with some prior knowledge.17 Women were certainly more au fait with famous poems and classic novels than, say, theoretical physics or economics. Indeed, one could even argue, as Flint does, that literary assessments ‘build on and develop faculties which were already considered to be present within women’ (p. 124), such as interpreting mood and intention, ascertaining social norms, or constructing moral codes. Yet, academia held little esteem for either their arts- focused finishing school educations or their purportedly innate aptitude for socialising and entertaining. Even at university, when women were supposed to read widely and carefully, men often ridiculed their eagerness. In his 1939 Oxford memoir, Christopher Hobhouse says that women would arrive at lectures with

handle-bars laden with note-books, and note-books crammed with notes. Relatively few men go to lectures, the usefulness of which was superseded some while ago by the invention of the printing press. The women, docile and literal, continue to flock to every lecture with mediaeval zeal, and record in an hour of longhand scribbling what could have been assimilated in ten minutes in an armchair.18

Although women often had valid reasons for being studious, such as compensating for informal home-schooling, men read their hard work as desperation and their enthusiasm as passive eagerness. The philological methods that had dominated textual study before the rise of English studies, in modern and ancient languages, for example, suddenly became cowardly for avoiding aesthetic judgements. Tillyard says, for example, that a Cambridge colleague, Miss Steele Smith, was ‘a timid old-maidish little scholar’ (p. 46) and that ‘[i]t was partly her timidity that kept her a philologist’ (p. 47). A picture begins to emerge of women in academia: passive, indiscriminate, literal, and excessively emotional.

16 Muriel Bradbrook, ‘My Cambridge’, in Women and Literature 1779-1982: The Collected Papers of Muriel Bradbrook, Vol. 2 (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), p. 115. 17 Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 90. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 18 Quoted in Mortimer Proctor, The English University Novel (Berkley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 135. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 13

Indeed, it is a curious coincidence that at the very moment women gain unprecedented opportunities to read, discuss, and write literature, literary academia declares itself above feminine modes and methods. The Cambridge-based ‘practical’ critics, in particular, start measuring literary phenomena in rather clinical distinctions: Empson of ambiguity, Richards of bad ways of reading. In Richards’s famous treatise, Practical Criticism, he calls ‘emotional reverberations’ mere ‘interference’ and ‘sentimentality’ a kind of ‘fatigue, illness’.19 Through such categorising of meaning and readerly responses, Ben Knights argues that literary studies tries to ‘supervise and regulate what had conventionally been seen as female cognitive styles (emotional empathy, identification, communicative nurture) and subject matters (subjectivity, relationships, romance, the family)’ (p. 44). Despite the fact that society at this time assumes that women are more naturally adept at social hermeneutics and is happier to school them in literature than in many other academic subjects, and despite the fact that some women have already been teaching literature for decades, literary academia’s so-called revolutionary movement relegates precisely the things it associates with women to charlatanism. By professionalising reading, then, literary studies effectively disenfranchised women from their cultural education, treasured pastime, and their primary asset, their social savour-faire. My main argument in this thesis is that early literary studies’ culture of anti-femininity has a tangible, material effect on the group of people academia assume are intrinsically feminine: women. During the discipline’s formative years (and since), both men and women treat women’s scholarship as less authoritative and less imaginative, calling it either casual, on the one hand, or industrious, on the other, but rarely genius. Q. D. Leavis’s four-part ‘Critical Theory’ on Jane Austen, for example, which I explore in chapter four, earns the epithet from Brian Southam of being ‘a kind of casual explanation’ simply because it discusses Austen’s compositional methods.20 Despite the fact that Leavis is herself trying to rescue Austen from assumptions that women writers are feeble amateurs who simply regurgitate their emotions and experiences, because Leavis uses biographical sources to try to dispel this myth, Southam simply sees a woman talking about another woman’s personal life. People are also quick to chastise academic women who defy stereotypes. According to Tillyard, Cambridge’s first Professor of English, Sir Arthur Quiller- Couch, calls Caroline Spurgeon a “bitter virgin” (p. 35) when she criticises his new English course. Reading University describes Edith Morley as ‘prejudiced’ for trying to negotiate a

19 I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment, ed. by John Constable (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 21, 257. 20 B. C. Southam, Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, Vol. 2 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 33. 14 professorial title that reflects her area of expertise.21 As women struggle for academic acceptance alongside literary studies, they continually get caught in the gendered crossfire. Women scholars’ accounts also allow us to glimpse the next stage of women’s struggles in higher education, as they enter universities as workplaces. Their entry into university work was as chequered as their entry into the lecture hall. Although the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 technically gave women the right to work in any occupation, many universities continued to hire men on principle, pay women lower wages, and give them more menial tasks. Dyhouse explains that, in 1888, for example, after classicist Jane Harrison came runner-up for the Chair of Archaeology at University College London, the department offered her work as an ‘occasional lecturer’ (p. 134). Dyhouse also explains that many women started out as teachers of teaching (p. 18) or initially secured pastoral positions such as college warden before moving into academic work (p. 135). Girton’s Record Book for English shows that when women began post-graduate study there in 1926 (p. 48), many immediately began teaching as well (p. 56). Academia tended to offer women posts resembling their socially permitted roles as caregivers and companions, but such work still tested the limits of acceptability, because it was clearly no longer simply a leisurely effort at self-cultivation. As the first woman scholar of English in the U.K., Edith Morley, states, ‘fathers and brothers felt it an insult to their manhood if their womenfolk suggested a “career”’.22 A career which also allowed them the time, space, and tools to reflect on their social roles was especially liberating—and potentially subversive.

Three Pioneers

Against the backdrop of literary academia’s gendered discourse, women scholars tried to carve out careers. The three women on whom this project focuses all achieved professional ‘firsts’ despite various personal and professional struggles. Edith Morley was the first woman to be awarded a professorship in English Language, by Reading University in 1912, Caroline Spurgeon was the first woman to be awarded a professorship in English Literature, by Bedford College in 1913, and Queenie Roth, now better known as Q. D. Leavis, was the first woman at Cambridge

21 University of Reading, Special Collections, Edith Morley Collection, MS 2049, Memo by the Dean of the Faculty of Letters W. S. de Burgh, 20 June 1912. 22 University of Reading, Special Collections, Edith Morley Collection, MS 938/7/4, Edith Morley, ‘Looking Before and After: Reminiscences of a Working Life’, p. 39. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. Published as Edith Morley, Before and After: Reminiscences of a Working Life, ed. by Barbara Morris (Reading: Two Rivers Press, 2016). 15 to be awarded a research fellowship in 1928. Morley and Spurgeon were also among the first cohort of women to study literature at King’s College, Ladies’ Department in London. Yet, while Morley, Spurgeon, and Leavis were all pioneers in their respective institutions, they were not the same generation. Spurgeon was born in 1869 in India, Morley in 1875 in London, and Leavis (then Roth) was born in 1906, also in London. Morley and Spurgeon both began their careers in 1901, Morley teaching German at King’s College, Ladies’ Department and Spurgeon teaching English at Bedford College. Leavis began teaching some thirty years later, at her alma mater, Girton, whilst studying for her Ph.D.. They only share the experience of being a pioneer due to the vast discrepancies between universities’ attitudes towards women and literary studies. These three women’s writing allows us to paint a picture of three very different academic institutions: Reading was a recently converted agricultural college; King’s College, Ladies’ Department was a prestigious outpost of the University of London; and Girton was a women’s college with a reputation for radicalism, but which in Leavis’s time was increasingly becoming integrated into Cambridge University. Because women’s colleges and vocational colleges were far more willing to welcome new recruits in any guise, whereas Oxbridge doggedly guarded its ancient traditions, these women’s experiences allow us to track both women and literary studies’ journeys into academia. This project spans the period 1900 to 1950 in order to encompass Morley and Spurgeon’s examinations in 1901, through to Cambridge University’s decision to award women like Leavis full degrees in 1948. In this period, we can also see literary studies transform from its first rather inchoate assemblies, such as Reading’s English department in the early days, to its more formalised iterations, such as Cambridge’s English Tripos in the ’40s. Morley, Spurgeon, and Leavis are also divided by class and educational backgrounds. The two older women were from upper-class families: Spurgeon’s father was a captain in the colonial forces, Morley grew up in Kensington. Indeed, if they had not gone on to teach, they would have counted as the ‘ladies’ who Dyhouse mentions frequenting early English courses. Leavis, on the other hand, was a lower-middle class North-Londoner. Both Morley and Leavis were Jewish, but they had very different upbringings: Morley’s house was big enough to accommodate 250 people for her coming-out ball; the Roth family ran a draper’s shop.23 Morley and Spurgeon both had international finishing-school educations (Morley studied in Germany, Spurgeon in Germany and France) before they met at King’s in 1899. Leavis, on the other hand, went to a grammar school and went to Girton on a scholarship. Their attitudes towards their educations were extremely different, too. In her memoir, Morley says with fondness that she found the ‘experience to work

23 See chapter one for a discussion of Morley’s and Leavis’s Jewish and class identity. 16 with kindred spirits in a common cause’ (p. 41) whilst at college. Spurgeon writes to Bedford’s Principle whilst visiting America that she misses their ‘very own humble little College so achingly badly’.24 Leavis, however, had rather conflicted feelings about her experiences of higher education, disliking the academic insularity and ‘determined sociality’ of women’s colleges.25 Morley and Spurgeon never married; Leavis married her former tutor. The three women also have different views on social causes, including their own as women. Morley was extremely politically active, involved at some point in her life with the Workers’ Educational Association, the Labour Party, the Fabian Society, the Townswomen’s Guild, the British Federation of University Women (BFUW), and the radical arm of the suffrage movement, the Women’s Social and Political Union. She received an OBE for her work setting up Reading’s Refugee Committee during the Second World War. Similarly, Spurgeon co- founded the International Federation of University Women (IFUW) in 1919 and fundraised enormous sums for scholarships and a physical headquarters for the BFUW. Morley and Spurgeon were both professionally very active, too, being members of the newly formed English Association. Spurgeon was also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and sat on the committee for the 1921 Newbolt Report, the first comprehensive government investigation into national educational standards and practices. Leavis was more politically engaged through her intellectual work, writing articles about class in contemporary novels by women, Virginia Woolf’s work on women in professions, and academic management.26 All three women write about their status as professional women: Morley writes a chapter about women scholars’ socio-economic situation in a 1913 collection she edits for the Fabian Society, Women Workers in Seven Professions; Spurgeon talks about women’s need for safe housing and social networks in a 1923 article titled ‘University Women and World Friendship’; Leavis writes about Woolf’s misconceptions of the professions in her review of Three Guineas, titled ‘Caterpillars of the Commonwealth, Unite!’ (1938). They all write autobiographical pieces. Morley’s memoir, titled ‘Looking Before and After: Reminiscences of a Working Life’, discusses her student days, professorship, and her political work. Spurgeon’s short piece, published in German in 1929, translates as ‘My Career’ and also focuses on her working life. Leavis’s memoir, unfinished and only published in part by G. S. Singh, discusses her childhood, family life, and

24 Folger Shakespeare Library, MS Add.347, Personal Papers of Caroline Spurgeon, S.d. 76. 25 Q. D. Leavis, ‘The Case of Miss Dorothy Sayers’, Scrutiny, 6 (December, 1937), 334-340, (p. 336). 26 See, for example, ‘Class-War Criticism’ (1937), ‘Lady Novelists and the Lower Orders’ (1935), ‘Caterpillars of the Commonwealth, Unite!’ (1938), ‘A Middleman of Ideas’ (1932), ‘The Discipline of Letters: A Sociological Note’ (1943). 17 reading habits.27 They also all write about the relationship between literature, literary study, and the contemporary moment: Morley writes a pamphlet for the English Association in 1919 on The Teaching of English in Schools; Spurgeon reflects in 1917 on ‘Poetry in the Light of War’ and in 1922 debates ‘The Refashioning of English Education: A Lesson of the Great War’; Leavis comments in the ’40s on the shortcomings of ‘The Discipline of Letters’. But while they all write about the political circumstances of women, literature, and literary academia, they engage with politics in distinct ways. Morley has perhaps the broadest socio-economic view of the three and sees academic women’s struggles as part of a wider battle for political emancipation. In a 1914 article on ‘The Economic Position of Women’, for example, she says that ‘the vote is but a symbol’, demands ‘economic reorganization’, and argues that because women are ‘economically dependent on individual men […] whatever the intrinsic value of their unpaid work’, ‘the community must compensate’ them for motherhood.28 A self-professed convert to ‘Socialism’, ‘feminist’, and friend to refugees, Morley tends to see political struggles in material terms and seeks material solutions.29 In her sociological study, Women Workers in Seven Professions, she reports the amount of funding currently available to women in scholarships, so that they will have more chance of being able to afford to study. While her most explicit political analysis appears in an essay on John Ruskin, I only discuss the piece briefly in chapter two, as it does not feature women and dwells primarily on the difference between economic and social value.30 What I am more interested in, however, is Morley’s desire to embark upon sociological research on academia; to treat scholars’ personal and socio-political circumstances as a valid object of study. As I discuss in chapter two, literary critics such as Richards and Empson, whose critical experiments and pseudo-scientific categories are later accredited with revolutionising the discipline, tend to extrapolate abstract psychological categories from literary persons. Morley’s interest in women professionals, on the other hand, applies her radical, material stance to literary academia, asking on a basic level what conditions are necessary for women to be able to read, think, and write at that point in time.

27 Singh quotes from the memoir in forewords to his Literary Biography of F. R. Leavis and his Critical Study of Q. D. Leavis. G. S. Singh, F. R. Leavis: A Literary Biography, with Q. D. Leavis’s “Memoir” of F. R. Leavis (London: Duckworth, 1995); G. S. Singh, A Critical Study of Q. D. Leavis’s Published and Unpublished Writings (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002). 28 Edith Morley, ‘The Economic Position of Women: An Account of some Work attempted by the Fabian Women’s Group’, The Economic Review, Volume xxiv, No. 4 (October 1914), 389-397 (pp. 389, 391). 29 In her memoir, Morley says that she was ‘converted to Socialism’ by William Morris’s News From Nowhere (p. 134), declares ‘‘Feminists’ we were, but emphatically not in the sense of being foolish and unnatural opponents of the other sex’ (p. 146), and mentions ‘meeting train-loads of Belgian refugees in London and elsewhere’ (p. 154). 30 Edith J. Morley, John Ruskin and Social Ethics (London: Fabian Society, 1916). 18

It is also noteworthy that Morley publishes almost exclusively on minor literary forms and genres, including Henry Crabb Robinson’s correspondence, Fanny Burney’s epistolary novels, and essays by Joseph Wharton, as well as on Ruskin.31 Again, I focus in this project on her work on women, looking at her 1925 article on Fanny Burney in chapter four, in which Morley eulogizes about Burney’s depictions of women’s concerns, conduct, and fashions. Morley argues that the emotional authenticity in Burney’s narratives – the fact that she ‘does not merely transcribe; she views reality through the medium of her own emotions and personality’ – is a major innovation in the history of the novel.32 Morley’s scholarly focus reflects her political views on women’s suffrage, addressing biographical literary texts, such as Crabb Robinson’s correspondence, or texts that are significant because they represent the personal, such as the intimate, material minutiae of eighteenth-century women’s lives. Morley’s materialism thus adheres to the old feminist adage that the ‘personal is political’.33 Spurgeon is similarly deeply invested in biography and in her activism is more concerned with forging communality among individuals than with restructuring economic systems. In her article ‘University Women and World Friendship’, Spurgeon argues that post-war cooperation will only come about through ‘informal meetings and straightforward and sincere discussion in small groups, only in short by personal relations’.34 In a 1924 address, she describes women as having ‘a certain community of interest’, which makes them ‘view things slightly differently from men’.35 Spurgeon helped the BFUW raise around $1 million for a headquarters in London to provide a space in which academic women could socialise and stay during research trips.36 She is also keen to communise literary education, saying in 1922 that a ‘large and eager democracy is knocking at the doors of our schools and universities and seeking entry, irrespective of sex or class’ and calling the Newbolt Report ‘revolutionary in spirit’.37 Spurgeon’s legacy, the IFUW, still provides women with financial and professional assistance today.38

31 See, for example, Edith J. Morley, The Life and Times of Henry Crabb Robinson (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1935); Edith J. Morley, ed., The Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson with the Wordsworth Circle, 1808-1866 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927); Edith J. Morley, ed., Crabb Robinson in Germany, 1800-1805 (London: Oxford University Press, 1929); Edith J. Morley, Fanny Burney (London: English Association, 1925); E. J. Morley, ‘Joseph Wharton’s Criticism of Pope’, Modern Language Notes, 36.5 (May, 1921), 276-281. 32 Edith J. Morley, Fanny Burney (London: English Association, 1925), p. 13. 33 See, for example, bell hooks, Feminist Theory from Margin to Centre, 2nd edn (London: Pluto Press, 2000), p. 26. 34 Caroline Spurgeon, ‘University Women and World Friendship’, Journal of American Association of University Women (March 1923), 1-14 (p. 2). 35 Caroline Spurgeon, ‘President’s Challenge of World Interests’, Journal of the American Association of University Women, Vol. xviii, No.1 (October 1924), 5-7 (pp. 6-7). 36 Folger Shakespeare Library, MS Add.347, Personal Papers of Caroline Spurgeon, S.d. 75, ‘My Career’. 37 Caroline Spurgeon, ‘The Refashioning of English Education: A Lesson of The Great War’, The Atlantic Monthly (January 1922), 55-67 (pp. 57, 58). 38 The organisation is now known as Graduate Women International (GWI). 19

Spurgeon’s scholarship is more conventional than Morley’s at face-value, focusing mostly on Shakespeare, Chaucer, and mysticism, but her approaches are somewhat unconventional. In her 1935 book, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us, she attempts to categorise all the playwright’s metaphors and deduce from them his personal traits, including a love of gardening and a sensitive ear. While Shakespeare’s Imagery is not the only index of its time, it is one of the more intriguing, because it is not interested in literary aesthetics. While I. A. Richards is defining bad kinds of criticism, Spurgeon takes the literariness of her texts as standard, and proceeds to more intimate diagnoses. As in her political life, her scholarship is passionately interested in people. Similarly, in a 1927 lecture on Jane Austen, she argues that scholars must look for ‘every scrap of information [they] can gather […] upon her character’.39 Biographical criticism was, of course, common in the late nineteenth-century, but whereas, as The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism states, the earlier ‘historiography placed a premium on verifiable evidence, especially in the form of biographical and bibliographical detail’, Spurgeon’s work uses biographical information to evangelise about the mysterious and the magical.40 In this project I focus on Shakespeare’s Imagery and the lecture on Austen, because in these pieces Spurgeon fervently argues for artistic individuality and readerly emotion. She also applauds distinctly feminine literary qualities, such as Austen’s simultaneously coy, yet also wry, ‘indirect revelation of character’ (p. 97). In many ways, Q. D. Leavis is a typical Cambridge scholar of the practical criticism era, intent on defining a new set of literary-critical principles for the age of evaluation. As she says in her 1932 book, Fiction and the Reading Public, when studying literature, ‘questions of standards and values are raised which bear on the whole history of taste’.41 Yet she also diverges from her male peers in crucial ways. Her study takes a radically socio-historic view of the literary landscape, by discussing publishing industry practices, and collects new data, surveying authors’ attitudes towards their readership. Her approach to the novel and, indeed, her preoccupation with the novel throughout her career, demonstrate a desire to investigate the social function of literature for the ordinary person that we rarely see in the practical critics. Although she is far less forgiving of critical missteps than Morley and Spurgeon, like them, she sees literature as a cultural medium

39 Caroline Spurgeon, ‘Jane Austen’, in Margaret L. Woods, ed., Essays by Divers Hands: Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, 7, New Series (1927), pp. 81-104 (p. 81). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 40 Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small, ‘The British ‘man of letters’ and the Rise of the Professional’, in A. Walton Litz, Louis Menand, Lawrence Rainey, eds., The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 7: Modernism and the New Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 377-388 (p. 381). 41 Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932), pp. xiii-xiv. 20 thoroughly embedded in people’s lives and therefore a medium through which critics can and should scrutinise society. Like Morley and Spurgeon, too, Leavis writes about conspicuously more women writers than her male peers. In the magazine Scrutiny, in the 1930s, she writes on an enormous array of novels by women, including those by Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Dorothy Sayers, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Katherine Mansfield, and Dorothy Richardson. She also edits and contributes introductions to various editions of works by Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Charlotte Bronte. As I discuss in chapter four, her focus on the novel is a bold choice for a young woman scholar, given academia’s attitude towards feminised persons and literary forms in that decade. Leavis sees different qualities in women’s work to the two older scholars, however. In her ‘Critical Theory’ of Jane Austen’s compositional techniques, published in four parts between 1941 and 1942, Leavis argues that the writer ‘took her novels very seriously’, was ‘highly disciplined’, and that her talent comes from ‘hard work’.42 Although she discusses Austen’s personal circumstances, too, she justifies having to ‘drag in biography’ with a desire to address ‘strictly critical problems’.43 Furthermore, she directly denounces Spurgeon’s idea that Austen’s work is a miracle and expresses deep regret that early women novelists have a reputation for precocious sentimentality. This is the only instance where any of the three women publicly engage with each other’s work, but it gives a clear indication that, by Leavis’s time, academia has successfully installed a masculinist doctrine. When Leavis argues that Austen is a great writer, she uses the new professional critical paradigm of stoicism and serious graft. Leavis is a curiously complex figure in all aspects. Her proximity to Cambridge and critics such as Richards, who supervised her thesis, might make her seem at first sight more integrated into the dominant academic literary scene than Morley and Spurgeon. But her own words convey a deep sense of detachment, berating critics who have established themselves in the Cambridge English department and literary coteries such as the Bloomsbury Group. Once Leavis left Girton, she appears to have relinquished its collegial spirit and, by trying to maintain her own career as a scholar as well as being married to another, was as much of an anomaly at Cambridge as Morley or Spurgeon were in their day. Yet, despite disliking many contemporary women writers and detesting explicit political professions of feminism, when she describes herself in correspondence

42 Q. D. Leavis, ‘A Critical Theory of Jane Austen’s Writings (I)’, reprinted in Collected Essays, Volume 1: The Englishness of the English Novel, ed. by G. S. Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 61-87 (pp. 65, 66). 43 Q. D. Leavis, ‘A Critical Theory of Jane Austen’s Writings (IIa), Lady Susan into Mansfield Park’, reprinted in Collected Essays, Volume 1: The Englishness of the English Novel, ed. by G. S. Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 86-111 (p. 93). 21 as a ‘cook-housekeeper’ or a ‘typist-collaborator’, she performs her own kind of linguistic resistance to naturalised gender roles.44 Furthermore, as I argue in chapter four, she also inadvertently contributes towards the feminist cause by paying women writers an unprecedented amount of scholarly attention. To return to what the three women share, the aspect of their work this project focuses on is how Morley, Spurgeon, and Leavis all approach literary texts in ways early academia considers feminine: biographical, socio-historical, political, and emotional reading. In the chapters that follow, I look in turn at their political writing, statistical and sociological methods, their writing on women’s academic environments, and their responses to femininity in women’s novels. All four of these critical tendencies break the golden rule of the new literary studies: they prioritise the socio-historic value of texts over the aesthetic value. They certainly discuss literary qualities, but rarely discuss them as though they have an intrinsic value for their literariness alone. For Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s images are evidence of his personality; for Morley, Burney’s technique is a new window into women’s experiences; for Leavis, Dorothy Sayers’s metaphors are a sign that women’s colleges nurture intellectual abnormalities. As I discuss in chapter three, Leavis has a particular tendency for ‘paranoid’ diagnoses, but, in the broader sense of being able to communicate something beyond itself, all the texts I discuss in this project use literature primarily as a diagnostic tool.45 Viewing the three women’s work together, I want to propose that these texts suggest a similarly diagnostic conclusion: that people whose circumstances politicise a part of their identity tend to be either unwilling or unable to shrug off those circumstances. Morley, Spurgeon, and Leavis inflect culture with the same lens through which society sees them, not because they endorse it, but simply because they are primed to notice it. I would therefore describe their criticism as pragmatic, because it is both constrained by and responsive to socio-political contexts. Gesturing towards Richards’s famed ‘practical’ method, I use the term ‘pragmatic’ as a way of querying how practical his method is for politicised readers or texts, who cannot or perhaps do not aspire towards his ‘objective criteria’ (p. 303), if objectivity is defined as unemotional and impersonal. As I discuss at length in chapter two, the ethical oversights of his experiments with anonymised texts and the universalising tendency of his resultant abstract categories suggest a desire for hermeneutic mastery to which the three women do not strive. They persistently

44 Girton College Archive, Personal Papers of Q. D. Leavis, GCPP Leavis 2/1/1, Postcards and letters to Cynthia Thyne, 1928-29, 14 August 1929; Girton College Archive, Personal Papers of Q. D. Leavis, GCPP Leavis 1/3/3/2, Letters from Q. D. Leavis to Mary Pitter (niece of F. R. Leavis), 1 July 1959. 45 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 125. 22 feminise their own work by declaring their failings, claiming that their work will help other scholars, or representing data without trying to interpret it. These qualities are not pejorative in themselves, however. Pragmatism is a response to constraints, but responsiveness can be a valuable intellectual quality. I do not argue that Morley, Spurgeon, and Leavis are hopelessly trapped by gendered discourses, but that, when one removes the evaluations academia places on such discourses, feminine critical modes appear incisive and insightful. When Spurgeon indexes all Shakespeare’s metaphors, we see his authorial consistency; when Morley delights in Frances Burney’s portraits of women, she re-states a soon-to-be-forgotten lineage of feminine narratives. Especially in novels, early women scholars’ work on novels shows us literary worlds that simply do not appear in men’s work of the same period.

Women and Femininity

Although this thesis is concerned with a particular moment in the history of women and literary studies’ journeys into academia, it is also concerned with what this moment tells us about gender ideology in general. To point out a basic premise, I am not arguing that women working in early English departments read or write in feminine ways because they are women. Indeed, they did not always read voraciously, write about their feelings, or discuss writers’ personal lives. What they did do, is consistently pay more attention to readerly emotion, writers’ socio-historic contexts, and representations of women’s experiences, especially in novels. But even when they do display these tendencies, neither they nor their tendencies are intrinsically feminine, either. Like many feminist thinkers, I see gender norms as a constellation of qualities contingent on specific times, places, and cultures. Indeed, various concerns of later feminist thinkers appear in Morley’s, Spurgeon’s, and Leavis’s work. Morley’s argument that society should compensate women for motherhood and Leavis’s denaturalising term ‘cook-housekeeper’ pre-empt the material feminisms of Silvia Federici in the 1970s. Spurgeon’s descriptions of IFUW hospitality and Leavis’s attempts to subtly influence her husband’s reading mirror Arlie Russell Hochschild’s work on emotion management in the 1980s. As Denise Riley argues, the category ‘“women” is historically, discursively constructed, and always relatively to other categories which themselves change’.46 Yet familiar threads run through gendered tropes, such as the notion that consumption is feminine, and familiar demands emerge from politicised women. In early-twentieth-century

46 Denise Riley, Am I That Name?: Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 1-2. 23 academic literary culture, women students usually appear as over-enthusiastic automatons. In turn, women scholars who defy such tropes are often painted as difficult, formidable, argumentative. Individuals in all aspects of academia saw women’s behaviour and traits through the lens of gender. If women’s actions confirmed contemporary tropes, it proved they were silly, emotional, and therefore intellectually inferior; if women’s behaviour defied stereotypes it proved that that particular woman was exceptionally bad. In short, women could not win. This is the process of gendering, or, in women’s case, feminisation. As Hélène Cixous argues, gender categories seem eternal and pervasive:

Where is she? Activity/passivity Sun/Moon Culture/Nature Day/Night Father/Mother Head/Heart Intelligible/Palpable Logos/Pathos […].47

As Cixous laments, ‘wherever discourse is organized’, ‘dual, hierarchical oppositions’ appear (p. 63). Not only the tropes themselves, but the very process of categorisation entangles women in social expectations. Furthermore, the ‘Culture/Nature’ distinction, which places women on the side of the physical and the organic, makes association appear not to be an association at all. The binary upholds itself by naturalising the socialised. In order to emphasise the mechanisms of feminisation, I use the word feminised – and not feminine – at various points in this project. When Tillyard calls Miss Steele Smith ‘timid’ because she is a philologist, for example, he feminises her by attributing a scholarly trait with a gender. When John Carey calls Q. D. Leavis an ‘archetypal Jewish matriarch’ in the 1980s, despite knowing that her Jewish family exiled her for marrying a Gentile, he feminises and racialises her.48 Various scholars use the same term to discuss how gender operates in early-twentieth-century

47 Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays’, in The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, and Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), pp. 63-5 (p. 63). The French text appeared in 1975 in La Jeune Née (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1975), pp. 115-19. 48 John Carey, ‘Queenie Leavis—a help or hindrance to her husband?’, The Listener, 7 (October 1982), 15-17 (p. 15). Jan Montefiore and Kate Varney, ‘A Conversation About Q. D. Leavis’, Women: A Cultural Review 19.2 (2008), 172- 187 (p. 175). 24 literary cultures, such as Rita Felski, for example, who uses it in The Gender of Modernity to describe how mass consumerism affected literary gendering. She argues that the ‘professionalized status of the literary […] is negated by the specter of a feminized aesthetics of consumption’, emphasising that a capitalist economy has contributed to women being portrayed as ‘victims of the ideology of consumerism’.49 Similarly, Ann Ardis claims that non-academic critics T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound also gender their ‘implied reader’ by not mentioning a rape scene in their critiques of Wyndham Lewis’s 1918 novel, Tarr.50 By modelling reading that does not over-identify or empathise with the characters, Ardis claims that these critics do not simply reject femininity, they ‘feminize what they devalue’ (p. 107). Their tropes do not only taint certain groups of people, but anything they associate with those people. The mechanisms of feminisation are particularly relevant when looking at early women scholars, because the changes in social status that access to education precipitated exposes their capriciousness. Studying fundamentally challenged contemporary ideas about womanhood, such as Arnold Bennett’s, for example, who writes in 1920 that ‘intellectually and creatively man is the superior of woman’, a situation which ‘no amount of education and liberty of action will sensibly alter’.51 Women scholars prove, however, that this situation can be altered, that women can defy type and create their own intellectual communities and traditions. But the story doesn’t end there. As Knights explains, English studies then sought to ‘differentiate itself from English at school, from the activity of ‘ordinary’ readers, from cultural materials beneath its notice, from ‘escapism’, sentimentality, and stock response’ (p. 26)—in other words, from feminine ways of reading. As literary academia adapted to the new roles women could play, it created a double standard in which men who read avidly were rigorous, yet women who read avidly were indiscriminate, and men who work hard were intensely creative, while women who work hard were obsequious automatons. Behind this project lurks the figure of Virginia Woolf, who remains one of the most prescient voices on literature and womanhood in the early twentieth century. As well as discussing her 1926 short story, ‘A Woman’s College From Outside’, in chapter three, I frequently refer to her thoughts on professional women. Her 1931 talk to the London/National Society for Women’s Service, ‘Professions for Women’, and her 1938 essay, Three Guineas, describe the importance of intellectual emancipation from families and husbands. In ‘Professions

49 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.; London, England: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 86. 50 Ann L. Ardis, Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 107. 51 Arnold Bennett, Our Women: Chapters on the Sex-Discord (London, 1920), pp. 101, 104, quoted in Kate Flint, ‘Revising Jacob’s Room: Virginia Woolf, Women, and Language’, The Review of English Studies, Vol. 42, No. 167 (Aug., 1991), 361-379 (p. 375). 25 for Women’, for example, she makes vital points that women need to kill off the doting ‘Angel of conventional womanhood’ if they want to develop a critical voice, and, in Three Guineas, she says that when women go out to work,

[i]n place of the admirations and antipathies which were often unconsciously dictated by the need of money she can declare her genuine likes and dislikes. In short, she need not acquiesce; she can criticize. At last she is in possession of an influence that is disinterested.52

But I also query her theories. As I discuss in chapter one, Morley’s experiences at Reading suggest that professional women have no more of a disinterested influence than men, and should not try to cultivate one whilst there are political battles to be fought. Whereas Woolf believes that women will reform the professions once they enter them, the experiences of the three scholars I study suggest otherwise. There is a material immediacy to their life-writing missing from Woolf’s speculations about what a woman’s college might do with a guinea and, as I discuss in chapter three, Woolf’s demand for a room of one’s own seems less radical when we resituate it in its original context, at Girton in 1928, to an audience of women students who already had their own rooms. Looking at early women scholars’ work, such as Morley’s Women Workers in Seven Professions, it becomes clear that professional life is not the gateway to intellectual freedom Woolf imagines. Like much feminist research, my project is interested in the entanglement of material and ideological oppressions. The era in which women become literary scholars opens up a new angle on this duality. Discussing women in early-twentieth-century social work, Denise Riley argues that these women suffered ‘a doubled feminisation’ in their proximity to ‘the social’, because its various aspects, ‘health, education, hygiene, fertility, demography’ (p. 51), are all associated with women. The woman social worker was thus ‘solidly inside of that which has to some degree already been feminised’ (p. 51). That is to say, when communities assign politicised associations (such as femininity) to traits as well as groups of people, it intensifies how those associations police the people from which these associations supposedly derive. Even though the woman social worker now has new professional opportunities, then, the fact that society still sees her work as feminine reinforces the idea that she is naturally proficient at that kind of work. Materially, she may have a better quality of life and greater access to public discourses surrounding health and

52 Virginia Woolf, ‘Professions for Women’, in The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of The Years, ed. Mitchell Leaska (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), pp. xxx-xxxiii; Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 174. 26 housing, but symbolically, in the eyes of society, she is still a woman concerned with womanly issues. In other words, she conforms to type. I propose that women in early literary studies suffer this same double feminisation. Academia relegates, among other things, teaching, novel-writing, and historical criticism, to second-rate intellectual activities because it deems them feminine, yet only abides women, reluctantly, when they perform those tasks. Edith Morley, for example, says in her 1919 pamphlet on The Teaching of English in Schools, that ‘English, properly taught, is then no soft option, no substitute for any harder or more fruitful subject’.53 But twelve years’ teaching experience do not save her from being gendered by Reading University. When Spurgeon, inspired by Richards, claims that metaphorical ambiguity communicates ‘in a way no precise description, however clear and accurate, can possibly do’, Richards himself later claims that in her ‘classifications of Shakespeare’s ‘imagery’’, ‘the metaphors are being sorted in respect to one only of the pair of ‘ideas’ which every metaphor, at its simplest, gives us’.54 Some women’s material circumstances may have improved, but paying women for their work does not stop universities aggressively gendering it, too. While Baldick and other historians of the discipline tend to attribute the shifts in early- twentieth-century literary criticism to professionalisation, few look at the effects of these shifts beyond the dominant intellectual discourse of the period. This project is concerned with how professionalisation demands that literary criticism expel its own feminisation by wider society and how women literary scholars, as a new class of professionals, are particularly vulnerable to the winds of ideological change. The clearest evidence of English studies’ caprice is in the transition from describing critics as eunuchs and spinsters to impersonal grafters, but the shift is also visible in women scholars, mostly obviously in their attitudes towards women novelists. The transition from Spurgeon to Leavis, from claiming Austen is a miracle-worker to claiming she is a hard- worker, epitomises how the terms in which women can assert the importance of women’s writing and feminine literary subject-matter change. Indeed, Q. D. Leavis’s work is a fascinating case study in the intellectual suppleness required to circumnavigate gender stereotypes, domestic demands, institutional apathy, and health issues, all whilst continuing to write about the novel. But all three women grapple with being gendered not only by the outside world – with its curfews, quotas, and caricatures – but also by their own internal knotty struggles with social convention. As Morley says of the women working in the seven professions, ‘[i]t is for her alone

53 Edith Morley, The Teaching of English in Schools (London: English Association, 1919), p. 34. 54 Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What it Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 9; I. A. Richards, Interpretation in Teaching, ed. by John Constable (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 120. 27 to decide whether new claims and old can be reconciled’.55 The primary significance of the three women’s stories, then, is that they demonstrate what conditions are necessary not simply to gain access to cultures and discourse, but to begin to make one’s own. The writings of Morley, Spurgeon, and Leavis suggest that accepting pioneers is not enough; only actively welcoming communities of pioneers give rise to new kinds of criticism, new cultures, and new visions of womanhood.

Existing Scholarship

This project intervenes in three main fields: histories of literary studies, research on women’s literature, and materialist approaches to early twentieth century literary cultures. It differs from extant scholarly work by addressing the work of pioneering women in literary studies as a socio- political phenomenon, as well as delineating the patterns in their critical methods and literary preferences. My research also develops existing research into the history of women in higher education. Carol Dyhouse’s 1995 book No Distinction of Sex?: Women in British Universities, 1870- 1939, for example, is an invaluable survey of women’s path into higher education in England and brought several figures, including Edith Morley, to my attention. The lives of Morley, Spurgeon, and Leavis reveal sides of literary academia that existing histories of the discipline do not show: what women researched, how they approached texts, their marital working partnerships, their college experiences. This project thus implicitly critiques existing histories of the discipline, which disregard early women academics’ work for the same reasons their peers and employers did: because it was not especially influential. In chapter one, I directly critique how later historians and scholars often paint Morley and Leavis, in particular, in negatively gendered terms. The main historical accounts of literary studies to date all describe the origins of literary studies through its most notable intellectual movements and influential figures. These are: D. J. Palmer’s The Rise of English Studies (1965), Chris Baldick’s The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848-1932 (1987), and Franklin E. Court’s Institutionalizing English Literature: The Culture and Politics of Literary Study, 1750-1900 (1992). The seventh volume of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, titled Modernism and the New Criticism (2000), also traces the discipline’s evolution at major institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge and outlines the critical principles of major figures. Gerald Graff’s book, Professing Literature (1987), documents the rise of the discipline in

55 Edith Morley, ed., Women Workers in Seven Professions: A Survey of Their Economic Conditions and Prospects (London: Routledge, 1914), p. 24. 28 the U. S., but has some useful insights into academic professionalism and the pragmatics of university teaching and research. Palmer’s book is primarily concerned with the trajectory of literary studies at Oxford. It covers the period before the university introduced degrees in literature, surveying in the first chapter the era of ‘Belle Lettres’ and earlier Classical textual study. The next chapter details the history of University College and King's College in London and the role of religious thought in their intellectual directions. The remaining chapters discuss adult education movements, state reforms, and the origins of newer universities. Palmer gives minute specifics of when certain institutions adopted literary studies, but less space to literary-critical developments. Palmer only offers extended discussion on the Oxford school in a chapter on the Reform Movement, the influence of John Churton Collins, and Walter Raleigh. The last chapter glances sweepingly over English at Cambridge and the newer universities. Chris Baldick’s book focuses mostly on critics based at Cambridge University and their influences and is therefore the most relevant counterpoint to my own research. It features chapters on figures who Baldick calls ‘the acknowledged leaders of English critical thought – Arnold, Eliot, Richards, the Leavises’ (pp. 15-6).56 He does not discuss Q. D. Leavis in detail, however.57 There are also two chapters on ‘larger social and educational developments’ (p. 61) that informed early academic literary study: the nationalistic rhetoric within ‘the regulations for admission to the India Civil Service’ and domestic reforms such as ‘the various movements for adult education including Mechanics Institutes, Working Men’s Colleges, and extension lecturing’ and ‘the specific provisions made for women’s education’ (p. 61). Baldick describes the ‘acknowledged leaders’ through their thought, but does not detail how the new discipline disseminated their theories or the kinds of communities it created. He admits that, ‘[l]ike Arnold’, he tends to see ‘‘his “Populace” as a kind of collective personality’ (p. 141), all literate in the same cultural materials, and presents literary academia as a place where ideas circulated freely. Baldick does point out, however, that his critics are disingenuous to posit themselves as ‘disinterested’ (Arnold), ‘impersonal’ (Eliot), or ‘objective’ (Richards), when they clearly had a ‘social mission’ (p. 234). Baldick concludes by noting that these critics ‘gutted and turned

56 Terry Eagleton borrows heavily from Baldick’s account in the first chapter of his widely read book Literary Theory: An Introduction, popularising the Arnold-Eliot-Richards-Empson-Leavis lineage and the notion that since its inception literary studies defined itself as morally instructive. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). 57 Baldick uses the term ‘the Leavises’ vaguely at time, and on one occasion erroneously. After mentioning F. R. Leavis by his initials, he then refers to ‘Leavis’, but the quotation is from page 78 of Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public: ‘Shakespeare, as F. R. Leavis had pointed out in Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture, entertained an audience embracing all social classes. Instead of being separately catered for by the cinema and the best-seller, “the masses were receiving their amusement from above… Happily,” Leavis adds, “they had no choice” (p. 177). 29

[criticism] into its very opposite: an ideology’ (p. 234), yet, his impression of a discipline defined by such a narrow intellectual lineage is equally ideological; the cursory surveys of adult education and the civil service do not mitigate the vast amount of time dedicated to ‘greats’.58 Court’s study provides more detail of literary institutional life. It places figures working in early English departments, such as David Masson, Walter Raleigh, and Henry Morley, within nineteenth-century intellectual traditions including utilitarianism and the free market theories of Adam Smith. Court’s attention to the way such traditions played out in departmental politics and pedagogical decisions is laudable. Unlike Baldick and Palmer, he argues that the ‘record of the genesis of English literary study’ is not only marked by ‘major institutional commitments’ and ‘the publication of definitive critical tomes’, but a whole host of minute, localised influences, including

conflicting pedagogical visions, territorial rifts, professional threats and jealousies, the rising awareness of British racial distinctions and British imperial power, the question of institutional credibility, economic constraints, the marketing of books, the idiosyncrasies of committee formulations, unwritten committee and department agendas, degree requirements, academic factionalism.59

While, as Court claims, his study is ‘less interested in generalized, conventional theories’, his research is also localised. Because he is mainly concerned with filling in gaps left by Palmer and Baldick, he confines his research to a different set of institutions, namely, the University of Edinburgh and University College London. Further, because he attempts to document literary study before Oxbridge adopts it, his study only spans the nineteenth century, meaning that he does not provide a corrective to the existing ‘generalized’ accounts. In 2017, Joseph North outlines a disciplinary history in Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History. North’s main argument is that ‘the “historicist/contextualist” paradigm’ in literary academia does not critique capitalism as many of its proponents claim, because it conforms to the neo-liberal demand for increasingly segmented “technological expertise”’.60 North argues that such historical analysis is a ‘depoliticization’ (p. 12), ‘a dead peace’ (p. 211), because it abandons value judgements and (to his mind) therefore ultimately favours the political right. North attributes the historicist/contextualist movement to scholars misreading Richards’s ‘close

58 As John Goode points out, ‘[Arthur] Symons, and the possibility of an entirely other critical method’ is ‘ignored’. John Goode, ‘The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848-1932, by Chris Baldick’, The Modern Language Review, Vol. 82, No. 3 (Jul., 1987), 717-718 (p. 718). 59 Franklin E. Court, Institutionalizing English Literature: The Culture and Politics of Literary Study, 1750-1900 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 3. 60 Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2017), pp. 1, 11. 30 reading’ and his intellectual heritage, such as the work of Raymond Williams. North dedicates his first two chapters to these figures, then moves on to assess the political efficacy of more recent schools of criticism, including New Historicism, New Aestheticisms, New Formalisms, and queer theory. As his title suggests, North’s project is highly selective. He calls the book a ‘strategic history’ that presents the ‘main lines of force’ rather than the “full picture” (p. viii). In line with his views on historicism, he warns that he makes ‘no programmatic attempt to recover the work of thinkers who have been ignored or marginalized’ (p. vii) and that ‘readers looking for a history of disciplinary criticisms, classroom methods, or its changing institutional sites, or its ties with journalism, or its role in primary and secondary schooling, will not find it here’ (p. 5). In short, North’s work is precisely the opposite kind of history to my own. North’s study raises two important questions: is a critical method inherently more or less politically good and/or effective? And secondly, what are the respective merits of different kinds of histories? While I agree with North that historicism exacerbates the fragmentation caused by the ‘field-coverage model’, I do not agree that all historicist research abandons evaluation or that it is especially susceptible to apoliticism. Even if some scholars prioritise literary contexts above texts, that does not detract from historicism’s aptitude for assessing the way that texts and contexts interact. But perhaps the most salient aspect of North’s argument is that he only sees analysis as evaluative. He does not address the notion that textual selection is also political and has little response to critics of the canon such as John Guillory, who points out in the ’90s that the politics of ‘exclusion’ go far beyond representation, yet, nevertheless ‘[t]he selection of texts is the selection of values’ (emphasis in the original).61 It is also important to note that many scholars highlight how writers who represent political struggles often deliberately use realist modes that resist thematic or aesthetic analysis. Heather Love has recently argued, for example, that a ‘descriptive’ critical approach would complement Toni Morrison’s ‘gift for realist description’.62 Indeed, the methodological variety in later feminist and post-colonial work suggests that we simply cannot categorise what kinds of criticism will effect political change; researching or teaching Morrison can be just as radical as teaching Percy Shelley’s anarchism. It also seems somewhat negligent to overlook the impact of explicitly political contextualist scholarship such as Kate Millett’s feminist diagnostic critiques, Eve Sedgwick’s explorations of queer lives, or decolonial work by Hortense Spillers.63

61 John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 23. 62 Heather Love, ‘Close Reading and Thin Description’, Public Culture, 25.3 (2013), 401-434 (pp. 382, 384). 63 See Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Hortense J. Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An 31

North’s chapter on Richards is particularly relevant to my research, as he argues that Richards’s work is more politically radical that it has been ‘misremembered’ (14), because Richards claims that it is ‘less important to like “good” poetry and dislike “bad,” than to be able to use them both as a means of ordering our minds’ (p. 327). While North takes this to imply that Richards sees ‘the aesthetic as a mode of instrumental, rather than final, value’ (p. 29), I disagree that ordering the mind is less problematic that prescribing value, because Richards’s ‘order’ is distinctly gendered, prohibiting sentimentality, personal associations, and other ways of reading literary academia associated with women at the time. I also disagree with North’s claim that this emphasis on order does not decontextualize texts, but choses to ‘examine as precisely as possible the actual relationships existing between works of literature and their most important context: their readers’ (p. 32). I would argue, however, that readers are not contexts of a work; they are audiences. If Richards was truly interested in literary reception, surely he would not attempt to quash certain textual responses. In a review of North’s book, Stefan Collini points out that North is incorrect to say that Richards ‘founded’ a ‘discipline’, and that his definition of a ‘dominant’ mode is slightly hollow without details about what it is dominating. 64 Collini goes as far as to say that North’s history is ‘not a history’ (p. 35). I would agree. Histories are necessarily selective; they cannot list every incident or person associated with a subject or movement. But I would question whether the history of academic literary studies can be told through the subject’s development in a very small selection of universities or by a few scholars. All the histories I have mentioned discuss old, prestigious universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, or, in Court’s case, University College London and the University of Edinburgh. Baldick and The Cambridge History also orient their intellectual discussions by individuals. Those that foreground different individuals and institutions do not venture far. The question that Woolf’s fictional Cambridge undergraduate, the eponymous hero of Jacob’s Room, muses over in an essay is pertinent: ‘Does History Consist of the Biographies of Great Men?’65 While I do not doubt that figures such as A. C. Bradley or I. A. Richards influenced the discipline immensely, I would question how we are able to gauge their influence without looking at what exists beyond those Great Men.

American Grammar Book’, Diacritics, Vol. 17, No. 2, Culture and Countermemory: The “American” Connection (Summer, 1987), 64-81. 64 Stefan Collini, ‘A Lot to Be Said’, London Review of Books, Vol. 39 No. 21, 2 November 2017, pp. 35-37 (p. 36). 65 Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008), p. 37. As Suzana Zink notes, this is a reference to Thomas Carlyle’s assertion in a 1840 lecture that ‘The History of the world is but the biography of Great Men.’ Suzana Zink, Virginia Woolf's Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 87. 32

Studies that do address the relationship between literary-critical values and university culture tend to focus on specific institutional factors. Alexandra Lawrie’s The Beginnings of University English: Extramural Study, 1885-1910 (2014), for example, discusses how literary studies flourished in institutions before finding a place in academia, such as working men’s colleges. Gauri Viswanathan’s book Masks of Conquest (1989) depicts the role of literary studies in the British colonial occupation of India, arguing that the civil service used the discipline’s evangelical impulse for imperialist ends. I am also indebted to Anna Bogen’s research on Women’s University Fiction (2013), which explore literary representations of women’s university experience and brought to my attention Q. D. Leavis’s review of Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night and Woolf’s short story, ‘A Woman’s College From Outside’. In the same vein as this research, my project looks at the university as a socio-political institution through a localised phenomenon, the early woman scholar of literature. Using a similarly materialist approach, I use women’s criticism and life- writing to assess how a gendered discourse shapes literary studies as it solidifies its institutional position. Some work has also been done on how early academic English studies genders literary value. Ben Knights’s book Pedagogical Criticism (2017), for example, provides an extremely useful discussion of masculinity in the work of the ‘practical’ critics, as well as later fictional works. Knights argues that literary studies tried from the beginning to dispel the notion that it was a ‘soft subject’ (p. 11) with ‘menacing fluidity’ (p. 14), and that it still tries to ‘differentiate itself from English at school, from the activity of ‘ordinary’ readers, from cultural materials beneath its notice, from “escapism”, sentimentality, and stock response’ (p. 26). Knights also highlights the connection between academia’s love of ‘arduous reading’ and ‘heroic male avatars’ and argues that establishing a ‘professionalised form of reading’ attacks ‘female cognitive styles (emotional empathy, identification, communicative nurture) and subject matters (subjectivity, relationships, romance, the family)’ (p. 44). My analysis builds on such remarks, asking how early women scholars navigate the material effects of academia’s gendered discourse. My archival investigations strongly support Knights’s claims, adding a new materialist perspective to his discussions, and the chronological coincidence of our projects suggests that they have timeliness and resonance. The small body of scholarly work that exists on the three main protagonists of this project treats them separately and mostly historically. Edith Morley’s literary criticism has received no substantial attention; Timothy Whelan makes brief references to her editions of Henry Crabb 33

Robinson’s correspondence.66 A few articles have been published on Caroline Spurgeon. Stanley Hyman discusses Shakespeare’s Imagery in ‘The Critical Achievement of Caroline Spurgeon’ (1948), a rather uneven overview that claims at one point that the book ‘does a good many things of real value’ and elsewhere that her statistics ‘make no improvements’ on existing scholarship.67 More recently, Renate Haas has written on Spurgeon and internationalism, providing a historical overview of Spurgeon’s professional achievements and her involvement in state interventions such as the Newbolt Report.68 Haas goes into detail about Spurgeon’s internationalist leanings and views on class in the British education system and discusses the IFUW’s political work with the United Nations. Juliette Dor’s article ‘Caroline Spurgeon (1869–1942) and the Institutionalisation of English Studies as a Scholarly Discipline’ (2009) is a similarly historical discussion of Spurgeon’s professional life, only dwelling briefly on her thesis on Chaucerian scholarship, which Dor claims is ‘a major contribution to the history of literary taste’.69 Elsewhere, Marina Cano discusses how Spurgeon uses nationalism in Jane Austen and Performance (2017).70 Q. D. Leavis is by far the most well-known of the three women and has correspondingly received more attention. Work on Leavis tends to fall into two categories: brief discussions hidden in books predominantly concerned with her husband, F. R. Leavis, and complimentary surveys of her work. Books such as Ian MacKillop’s F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism (1995) and Denys Thompson’s The Leavises: Recollections and Impressions (1984) contain useful biographical summaries, but rarely delve into Q. D.’s intellectual work.71 Nicholas Tredell’s article ‘I’m Not Complaining: Q. D. Leavis and Woman’s Estate’ (1984) is a slightly ungenerous, biographically deterministic assessment of her conflicted attitudes towards femininity, looking at her work on contemporary women writers such as Ruth Adam, Dorothy Sayers, and Virginia Woolf.72 P. M.

66 See Timothy Whelan, ‘Crabb Robinson’s Correspondence with Mary Wordsworth’, The Wordsworth Circle, 45.1 (2014), 11-21; Timothy Whelan, ‘Mary Hays and Henry Crabb Robinson’, The Wordsworth Circle, 46.3 (2015), 176- 190. 67 Stanley Hyman, ‘The Critical Achievement of Caroline Spurgeon’, The Kenyon Review, 10.1 (Winter, 1948), 92-108 (p. 95-96). 68 Renate Haas, ‘Caroline Spurgeon - English studies, the United States and Internationalism’, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 38 (2002), 215-228. 69 Juliette Dor, ‘Caroline Spurgeon (1869-1942) and the Institutionalisation of English Studies as a Scholarly Discipline’, PhiN-Beiheft, Supplement 4 (2009), 55-66 (p. 63). 70 Kathryn Sutherland, ‘Jane Austen and the invention of the serious modern novel’ in Thomas Keyner and John Mee, eds., The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 244-262; Marina Cano, ‘Early Re-Enactments’, Jane Austen and Performance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 59-79. 71 Ian MacKillop, F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism (London: Allen Lane, 1995); Denys Thompson, The Leavises: Recollections and Impressions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 72 Nicholas Tredell, ‘I’m Not Complaining: Q. D. Leavis and Woman’s Estate’, PN Review, 38, 10 (May-June 1984), 37-38. 34

J. Robertson’s book, The Leavises on Fiction: An Historic Partnership (1981), discusses the Leavises’ collaborations and, briefly, Q. D.’s work of Jane Austen.73 In an article titled ‘Queen of Critics’ (1983), Robertson considers Q. D.’s claims that she authored some of her husband’s criticism, detailing some of the similarities between the two Leavises’ work on the novel.74 More recent scholarship takes a more analytical look at Leavis’s work. In the article ‘Women and Education under Scrutiny’ (2004), Victoria Stewart looks at Leavis’s attitudes to women’s education through her writing on Woolf, Sayers, and Rosamund Lehmann.75 Ben Knight’s essay, ‘Reading as a Man: Women and the Rise of English Studies in England’ (2005), looks at how the Cambridge school of critics and Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public condemn and feminise ordinary readers and so-called ‘mass culture’.76 G. S. Singh, editor of Leavis’s Collected Essays, gives syntheses of her work in an article titled ‘Q. D. Leavis and the Novel’ (2003) and in a book, A Critical Study of Literary Critic Q. D. Leavis’s Published and Unpublished Writings (2002).77 My work differs from this existing body of scholarship by looking at early women scholars as a group, identifying general patterns in their professional struggles and critical tendencies. My research combines the historical specificity of women scholars’ experiences with a theoretical analysis of how gender operates in literary-critical discourse and the university’s professional rhetoric in the early twentieth century. Whereas existing scholars, such as Knights, tend to either critique gender in broader, theoretical strokes or, like Haas, present women scholars’ work in isolated historical contexts, I tether their critical tendencies to their socio-political environments. This project therefore continues the recovery work necessary to reconstruct a more detailed picture of the disciplinary landscape, but also to make the connections between the university’s institutional power and literary-critical tendencies. In chapter three, for example, I look at how experiences of college life emerge in women’s university fiction and women’s criticism of that fiction as queer coding. I study women’s early literary scholarship precisely because it is not paradigm-shifting, but because its existence reflects other political and economic changes existing histories overlook. By looking at this particular marginalised group’s experiences, we can glean

73 P. M. J. Robertson, ‘Queen of Critics: The Achievement of Q. D. Leavis (1906-1981)’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Winter, 1983), 141-150. 74 P. M. J. Robertson, The Leavises on Fiction: An Historic Partnership (London: Macmillan, 1981). 75 Victoria Stewart, ‘Q. D. Leavis: Women and Education under Scrutiny’, Literature and History: A New Journal for the Humanities, 13.2 (2004), 670-85. 76 Ben Knights, ‘Reading as a Man: Women and the Rise of English Studies in England’, in Miriam Kauko, Sylvia Mieszkowski, and Alexandra Tischel (eds), Academia’s Gendered Fringe: A Historical Perspective, 1890-1945 (Gottingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2005), pp. 65-81. 77 G. S. Singh, A Critical Study of Literary Critic Q. D. Leavis’s Published and Unpublished Writings (Lewiston, N.Y.; Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 2002); G. Singh, ‘Q. D. Leavis and the Novel’, English Studies, 84.4 (2003), 355-371. 35 more about what exists beyond the ‘Great Men’ of early literary academia, but also how they define greatness, for they were undoubtedly the ones who did. I also find several new legacies arising from their work. Recent statistical analysis such as Franco Moretti’s ‘distant reading’, for example, reimagines Spurgeon’s tallies and tables for the digital age.78 Morley’s chapter on life in academia maps onto Heather Love’s work on sociological autoethnographies and ‘thick description’ as an alternative to revelatory hermeneutics (p. 404). While F. R. Leavis’s impact upon British Cultural Studies often overshadows Q. D. Leavis’s, in chapter two, I return to the works of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and Richard Hoggart to demonstrate that Fiction and the Reading Public is central to their thinking about literature as a culturally diagnostic tool. This project is the first to explore these early antecedents of what many see as recent critical incursions, demonstrating that our histories are equally theoretically narrow if they only focus on ‘main lines of forces’. There were many experiments during the era of practical criticism and only some tried to inaugurate aesthetical evaluation. The statistical methods of Morley, Spurgeon, and Leavis, which academia once considered hopelessly literal or partial, are now seemingly inventive, again. It is therefore timely and profitable to revisit their work.

Methodologies

In this project, I combine textual analysis and historical materialist research, using published works of criticism, life-writing, correspondence, teaching notes, and institutional records. I foreground the socio-historic contexts within which Morley’s, Spurgeon’s, and Leavis’s scholarship is written, including their workplace conditions, domestic arrangements, and wider academic and literary communities. My historical materialist approach views the literary ideas and aesthetic choices that dominated early literary academia as the product of specific times, places, and cultural trends. In chapter two, for example, I consider I. A. Richards’s appeals to ‘objective criteria’ alongside T. S. Eliot’s ‘impersonal’ theory of poetry and the rise of scientific and social scientific disciplines in U.K. universities from around the middle of the nineteenth century. In contrast with Richards’s theories, I believe that ‘the interference of emotional reverberations’ and ‘stock responses’ of readers are important, because they can tell us how literary culture and wider society at that time responds to societal idioms. Indeed, the dominance of practical criticism makes it even more important to relativise Richards’s claims with institutional and personal

78 See Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review, 1 (Jan-Feb 2000), 54-68. 36 histories; to identify that the universalising call for critical objectivity and impersonality is not, in fact, universal, but the product of a particular moment. To briefly summarise the contents of my protagonists’ archives: Morley’s archive at Reading University contains correspondence with university management, publishers, and friends, including Caroline Spurgeon. The archive also contains her lecture notes from King’s College, lectures delivered at Reading, leaflets advertising her adult education courses, newspaper cuttings, and the typescript of her memoir (which was unpublished when I began the project). Spurgeon’s documents at Royal Holloway University contain personal correspondence from her days as a student and novice lecturer, and a few documents from her time living at Alciston in Sussex. There are also manuscripts of lectures she attended as a student, lectures she gave, research notes, and materials relating to Spurgeon’s trip to America in 1917. Spurgeon’s archive at the Folger, donated by her long-term partner and executor, Virginia Gildersleeve, contains personal and professional correspondence from throughout her lifetime and engagement diaries. The archive also holds Spurgeon’s index cards for Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us, masses of notes, and various manuscripts and typescripts. Finally, there is correspondence relating to Spurgeon’s trip to the U. S., her first exchanges with Gildersleeve, and the origins of the International Federation of University Women. Q. D. Leavis’s personal papers at Girton College include correspondence spanning her adult life, including early reflections on married life, discussions with colleagues and former students about academic life, recipes, and newspaper cuttings of reviews. I also use several other archives in the course of my research. I consult Downing College Library for F. R. and Q. D. Leavis’s correspondence to various former students and colleagues. Girton College’s English Director of Studies notebooks provide a useful overview of the literary courses on offer for early women students. Girton also holds records of students’ reactions to Virginia Woolf’s 1928 visit. I use documents from the Fabian Society Women’s Group archives at The London School of Economics relating to Edith Morley’s sociological survey, Women Workers in Seven Professions. I consult Reading University archive for the management’s perspective on Morley’s professorship and subsequent negotiations. The Keep in Sussex provides Caroline Spurgeon’s guest book for her cottage in Alciston. I use I. A. Richards’s archive at Magdalene College Old Library in Cambridge to study notebooks on the early ‘Practical Criticism’ courses and examination questions. Finally, the University Library, Cambridge, holds Q. D. Leavis’s Ph.D. thesis and provides a snapshot into the early English Tripos through Faculty meeting minutes. 37

My methods are informed by a substantial body of feminist historical materialist research into early twentieth century literary cultures. Work on circulating libraries and public readership, literary institutions such as publishing houses, and magazine culture provides a blueprint for my approach. In chapter one, Pam Thurschwell and Leah Price’s work on secretaries and typists and Natalia Cecire’s study of readability and gender in Gertrude Stein’s poetry inform my conclusions about gendered intellectual labours. In chapter three, I proceed from work by Kate Flint on the characterisation of women readers in instruction manuals and literary texts to look at their depiction in academic discourse at this time. This research centres the text within early twentieth- century social and intellectual movements such as the suffrage movement, changes to employment law, the invention of cheap paperbacks, and the rise of the middle-classes. Indeed, in chapter three, I argue that women scholars’ writing on academic life resists historically decontextualised reading because they did not study or work in neutral environments. It is also necessary to use a materialist approach to these women’s academic writing because their bibliographies are often slim. By looking at documents that seemingly have no literary or academic value, such as invitations, recipes, or professional marginalia such as teaching materials, I attempt to expand our knowledge of Morley’s, Spurgeon’s, and Leavis’s intellectual work. My project is therefore informed by the recent ‘archival turn’ in feminism and queer theory, as theorised by Ann Cvetkovich, Carolyn Steedman, and others. Archive theory asks researchers to be cognisant of the past as a lost object that even the archive cannot preserve. Steedman says, for example, that the past is that which ‘cannot be retrieved, but which may be represented’; that the ‘object (the event, the happening the story from the past) has been altered by the very search for it’.79 By studying three academic women’s archival documents collectively, I hope to alter them beneficially, transforming them into evidence that these women experienced systemic discrimination, for example, or that they forged communal literary cultures. Archive theory reminds us that returning to primary source material does not necessarily garner neglected truths, but can complicate grand narratives. As a project concerned with the birth of a discipline, my research clearly addresses other kinds of origins, too. Steedman repeats Jacques Derrida’s warning that the archive is ‘inextricably bound up with the authority of beginnings and starting points’ (1); that going back to the source can replicate the idea that there is such a thing as an infallible source, an authoritative account. There are major findings in all three women’s archives, however, that challenge institutional narratives. Edith Morley’s correspondence with Reading University, for example, shows that although she gains a pioneering

79 Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 69, 77. 38 professorship, the university deliberately demoted her to a new male professor and forced her to accept an inaccurate title. Caroline Spurgeon’s correspondence at the Folger tells us that she set up the IFUW with a woman who describes her as arousing an ‘indefinable electric connection’, a woman whom Spurgeon later calls one of her two ‘friends with racing hearts’.80 Q. D. Leavis’s recipes held at Girton, which she wrote on the back of important legal and academic documents, attest to the day-to-day challenges of being both a woman scholar and the wife of a scholar in the early twentieth century. The archive also illuminates how absences are communicative, too. Ann Cvetkovich highlights that ‘gay and lesbian cultures often leave ephemeral and unusual traces’, because they operate in ‘forms of privacy and invisibility that are both chosen and enforced’.81 In chapter three, in which I explore the ways women scholars encode queer collegiate cultures, I read Spurgeon’s letters alongside Lilian Faderman’s work on historical queer identities and with an eye on socio- historic circumstances, such as war-time censorship. By interpreting critical texts as capable of meaning more than they explicitly say, I also read them as ‘literary’ texts. Also in chapter three, I look at Q. D. Leavis’s criticisms of women’s colleges as an example of Eve Sedgwick’s ‘paranoid reading’. If we read criticism as a cultural object, works by women like Leavis can provide material proof that the gender ideology of the time, which cast women as passive and silly readers, is wrong. Women’s academic origins are important not simply as a new window into the nascent discipline of literary studies, but because they mark the origin of new forms of public life for women.

Chapter Summaries

This project’s four chapters cover how gender operates in early academic literary studies in four areas: women scholars’ working lives, critical experiments, academic environments, and attitudes towards women’s literature. Chapter one, ‘Rogue Professionals’, provides a socio-political context for the project by looking at women literary scholars’ working lives through life-writing and institutional archives. I use T. S. Eliot’s gendered definition of a new literary professional in the 1918 article,

80 Folger Shakespeare Library, Personal Papers of Caroline Spurgeon, MS Add.374, S.d.76, Letter from Virginia Gildersleeve to Caroline Spurgeon 5th February 1919; Letter from Caroline Spurgeon to Lilian Clapham 18th January 1931. 81 Ann Cvetkovich, Archives of Feeling: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham and London; Duke University Press 2003), p. 8. 39

‘Professionalism, Or, …’, as a springboard from which to argue that the professionalisation of literary studies by academia demands that textual scholars display unemotional intellects. In the first half of the chapter, I explore how gender informs Edith Morley’s interactions with her employer, Reading University. Using her correspondence and autobiography, I argue that by giving Morley a professorship in English ‘Language’, the university exploits literary studies’ recent turn against philology, and its feminine associations, to surreptitiously diminish her authority. I then use Reading’s archives and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s theories on emotion management to argue that, when Morley complains, university management dismiss her demands by weaponising masculine notions residual in professionalism, such as stoicism and impartiality. In the second half of the chapter, I discuss Q. D. Leavis’s professional issues in domestic and editorial work. Using feminist theory from the ‘Wages Against Housework’ era by Michelle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, Angela Davis, and Silvia Federici, I discuss how Leavis’s composite labels for herself suggests that she resists naturalised gender roles. I go on to argue that work such as editing and typing are the literary equivalent to domestic labour because they are seemingly unproductive and invisible, referring to scholarship by Pamela Thurschwell and Leah Price on secretaries. I conclude by discussing how Leavis’s use of the phrase ‘partnership principle’ to describe her marriage epitomises her measured, pragmatic class politics. I also outline how Morley and Leavis exhibit the typical politics of a pioneer, using Erving Goffman’s work on social stigma and Sander Gilman on Jewish self-presentation, arguing that institutional marginality forces early women scholars to forge simultaneously defiant and self-deprecating identities. My second chapter, ‘Assays of Bias’, looks at the three women’s statistical methods compared with the prevalence of terms such as ‘objectivity’ in the work of critics such as Richards and Empson. I argue that these women employ statistical analysis in notably feminised ways: by positioning themselves as technicians rather than omniscient scientists, by claiming that their methods are impartial rather than themselves, and by studying people. I begin by exploring Spurgeon’s indexing methods in her 1935 book, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What it Tells Us, as an example of feminised computational work. Looking at Spurgeon’s notes at the Folger library, I then examine how she translates Richards’s theories of experimental reading in his 1925 article, ‘Science and Poetry’, into a highly personal and person-focused method. I argue that there are various similarities between Spurgeon’s taxonomy and Franco Moretti’s experiments in ‘distant reading’. In the middle section of the chapter, I look at Edith Morley’s 1914 sociological autoethnography in Women Workers in Seven Professions, arguing that her comments and Fabian theories on the interview suggest that collecting data from persons requires feminine skills such as 40 performing authentic friendliness, not, as Richards claims, encouraging participant stoicism. I go on to look at Q. D. Leavis’s 1932 survey of reading habits, Fiction and The Reading Public, arguing that her taxonomy of novelistic taste is innovative even within the Cambridge department of the period. Via a survey of her influence on British Cultural Studies, I go on to debate the notion of critical distance in Leavis’s decision to call her approach ‘anthropological’, not sociological. To conclude, I argue that while the practical critics perceive critical objectivity as a necessary virtue of the researcher, these three women scholars employ a more pragmatic neutrality through methodological decisions that does not aim to construct aesthetic hierarchies. Chapter three, ‘The Room Behind the Mind’, is concerned with how women students and scholars of literature in the early twentieth century respond to academia’s notions of gendered reading and study, as well as how these women present women readers and feminine reading in their criticism. My argument in this chapter is that women’s writing on college life cannot be understood by reading ‘practically’ because their work demands prior knowledge of highly localised behaviours, rituals, and linguistic codes. Using Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theories, I argue that women’s literary and critical work in this period presents colleges as queer environments because colleges provide intimacy and care without aggressively gendered heterosexual or familial roles. In the first half of the chapter, I look at how queerness is coded in two contemporary literary representations of women students and colleges, successful children’s author L. T. Meade’s 1891 novel, A Sweet Girl Graduate, and Virginia Woolf’s 1926 short story, ‘A Woman’s College From Outside’. In the next section I look at queer codes in Caroline Spurgeon’s correspondence regarding her domestic arrangements and the IFUW community, referring to Lillian Faderman’s scholarship on historical references to relationships between women. I argue that Spurgeon’s investment in intellectual hospitality suggests that the environments in which writers produce literary work are not neutral and cannot be ubiquitously ignored by critics. Finally, I look at Q. D. Leavis’s negative view of women’s academic community in her review of Dorothy Sayers’s 1935 detective novel Gaudy Night. I propose that Leavis’s criticism is an example of Sedgwick’s theory of ‘paranoid reading’, because it re-enacts the pathologically feminine critical qualities it prohibits. I also argue that, by claiming formal literary learning is an embarrassing open secret, Leavis illuminates the socialised nature of both contemporary gender conventions and literary taste. My final chapter, ‘Jane Austen, Miracle-worker’, looks at Morley’s, Spurgeon’s, and Leavis’s contributions to the emerging field of novel studies. I propose that, contrary to the prevailing narrative that F. R. Leavis’s 1948 book, The Great Tradition, inaugurated university 41 novel studies, Q. D. Leavis – and women scholars in general – made significant earlier attempts to canonise the novel. In the first section of the chapter, I survey early scholarship on Virginia Woolf, suggesting that feminised literary subjects, such as women, students, and novelists, are most likely to read women novelists at this time. I then look at Caroline Spurgeon’s 1927 lecture on Jane Austen and Q. D. Leavis’s objections to it in the 1940s. I argue that Leavis’s counterargument that Austen is a hard-worker, not a miracle-worker, indicates that literary academia has successfully embedded masculine professional ideals into critical discourse. The middle section of the chapter contextualises Leavis’s and Spurgeon’s work on Austen with Edith Morley’s 1925 essay on Fanny Burney. Referring to work on Austen by Daniel P. Gunn and D. A. Miller, I argue that Morley and Spurgeon appreciate early women novelists for steering through the complexities of social etiquette, whereas Leavis dislikes narrative and social sleights of hand alike. Finally, I present textual analysis and biographical evidence that Q. D. Leavis wrote at least parts of the introductory chapter of The Great Tradition and, therefore, was invested in outlining a novelistic canon as much, if not more, than her husband. I conclude by proposing that all three women envision a different novelistic lineage to the one literary academia eventually adopts—a distinctly more feminine canon containing Burney and Austen.

Rogue Professionals: Gender in Academic Literary Labours

The new academic professional thought of himself as an “investigator” devoted to advancing the frontiers of knowledge through research, and his loyalties went to his “field” rather than to the classroom dedication that had made the older type of college teacher seem a mere schoolmaster. The prototype of the new professional was the German university professor in his lecture room or seminar, a man who supposedly transcended morality and ideology in his disinterested search for truth. Gerald Graff, 1987

Professionalism, or…?

In a 1918 article, titled “Professionalism, Or….”, T. S. Eliot defines a new kind of literary critic. Eliot says that this critic should be a ‘specialist’ and the literature they scrutinise should be the product of ‘hard work on style with singleness of purpose’.1 For Eliot, these are the defining characteristic of the professional: expertise, toil, and dedication. But why take pains to define literary criticism at this moment? Why would an art which had been practiced for centuries need a new manifesto now? Literary culture was changing profoundly in the early twentieth century: free verse exploded the poetic rulebook, new poetry magazines launched, coteries formed outside the established aristocratic literati. The texture of the period, frequently referred to as Modernism, is encapsulated by Ezra Pound’s calling cry to ‘make it new’.2 British universities were making it new in Eliot’s exact terms: professionalising. Chris Baldick explains that various factors altered higher education around the turn of the twentieth century, including ‘the regulations for admission to the India Civil Service’, ‘movements for adult education’, and ‘women’s education’.3 Universities no longer taught bible scholars; they ensured Britain had ‘a tested elite’ (p. 90). Literary studies was a part of the new apprenticeship. At the same time Eliot is writing, then, British universities are introducing a whole new literary institution – English

1 T. S. Eliot [signed as Apteryx], “Professionalism, Or….”, The Egoist, April 1918, p. 61. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 2 Ezra Pound, Make it New (London: Faber and Faber, 1934). 3 Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848-1932 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), p. 61. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 43 studies – and beginning to teach criticism systematically for the first time. But for Eliot, professional criticism is not necessarily a paid occupation, it is a state of mind. In this chapter, I explore how this state of mind becomes a mandate for masculinity when literary academia makes criticism a paid profession. Eliot’s title implies that there is no alternative to professionalism. In the article, however, he does mention one antithesis: a contemporary writer called Mrs Meynell. Eliot calls her an ‘amateur of letters’, saying that her writing is ‘what a University Extension audience would like’ (p. 61). As Alexandra Lawrie explains, the University Extension Movement was an ‘organised and functional educational scheme’ set up during the 1870s, with the aim of ‘providing tertiary teaching for those unable to go to university’.4 Because the scheme aimed to attract those ‘eager for self- improvement’ (p. 57), though, and only involved part-time study in local institutions, some perceived it as a lackadaisical apprenticeship for hacks and novices. By opposing the ‘man’ of letters with the ‘amateur’, then, Eliot suggests that women who teach at ordinary institutions are even more tainted by feminine associations than men of letters, who are already disturbingly effeminate. For Eliot, amateurism is essentially synonymous with womanhood and the worst kind of critic is a woman who teaches at an ordinary institution. Yet the first woman to be made a professor of English in the U.K. – Edith Morley – was precisely that. Awarded a professorship in 1912 at Reading University, a recently transformed agricultural college, Morley herself taught in adult education for many years.5 This chapter is concerned with how women in early literary academia respond to the discourse of professionalism Eliot outlines – expertise, toil, and dedication – and how the value of academic literary work at this time is affected by gender. Looking at Morley’s memoir, Looking Before and After (written in the 1940s and published in 2016) alongside Reading University’s institutional archives, I explore her working life and self- reflections before contrasting her experiences with those of another pioneering woman scholar: Q. D. Leavis, the first woman at Cambridge to be awarded a post-doctoral research fellowship in English.6

4 Alexandra Lawrie, The Beginnings of University English: Extramural Study, 1885-1910 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 56. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 5 Morley says in her memoir that she taught with the Workers’ Educational Association. University of Reading, Special Collections, Edith Morley Collection, MS 938/7/4, ‘Looking Before and After: Reminiscences of a Working Life’, p. 129. Further references to this collection are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. Published as Edith Morley, Before and After: Reminiscences of a Working Life, ed. by Barbara Morris (Reading: Two Rivers Press, 2016). 6 Cambridge, Girton College Archive, Academic and Library Collection, GCAC 2/2/9, ‘Director of Studies in English Record Book’, Volume I. (1917-1936), ‘Awards June 1929’ [unpaginated]. Further references to this collection are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 44

I argue in this chapter that at this time academia creates a hostile, masculine intellectual environment for women by undervaluing work that does not produce immediate results such as teaching and pastoral care (work women tend to do) and by demanding the regulation of emotion at all times (even in the face of discrimination). Eliot’s professional characteristics – expertise, toil, and dedication – are masculine not only in opposition to Mrs Meynell, but because universities do not recognise work they deem feminine equally. In the course of this chapter I find that literary studies uses masculine professional rhetoric in several ways, namely, by: gendering critical methods such as philology; seeing women as excessively emotional; gendering academic activities such as teaching and research; being unsympathetic to childcare or health issues; expecting scholars’ wives to perform feminised intellectual work for little remuneration or recognition. Early women scholars develop as a result what I call a pioneer’s politics: they politicise their circumstances, are self-deprecating, consider themselves exceptional, and feel a duty to speak on behalf of their identity group. I argue in this chapter that their pioneer status makes it impossible for them to embody Eliot’s ideal critic. At the time Eliot is writing, the literary academic is a strange new figure, a hybrid of critic, scholar, and teacher. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism calls two early literary professors at Oxford and Cambridge respectively, Sir Walter Raleigh (1904-1922) and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1912-1944), examples of the ‘man of letters turned professor’.7 Q. D. Leavis also comments in 1934 that Raleigh was ‘perpetually anxious to show that he was not a don, not a professional man of letters, not a serious teacher of literature’.8 He and Quiller-Couch were both upper-class and had strong public personas, being famed for entertaining lectures rather than meticulous research. Eliot suggests, though, that this early incarnation is becoming an anachronism. In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), he again evangelises about great art requiring ‘great labour’ (p. 40) and declares that the ‘emotion of art is impersonal’ (p. 49). Unlike the aristocratic dilettantes of yore, the new literary ‘specialist’ earns their authority. Eliot replaces the trope of the Romantic tormented genius with the image of a writer tortured by toil. The gender of critical values has also changed. In a 1904 letter, Sir Walter Raleigh says that ‘[t]he eunuch was the first modern critic’ and that he ‘can’t help feeling that critical admiration for what another man has written is an emotion for spinsters.’9 As far as Raleigh is concerned, all criticism

7 Wallace Martin, ‘Criticism and the Academy’, in A. Walton Litz, Louis Menand, Lawrence Rainey, eds, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 7: Modernism and the New Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 267-321 (p. 312). 8 Q. D. Leavis, ‘The Discipline of Letters: A Sociological Note’, Scrutiny, 12 (Winter 1943), 12-26 (p. 15). 9 Letter to John Sampson 31st December 1904, Walter Raleigh, The Selected Letters of Walter Raleigh (1879-1922), ed. by Lady Raleigh, (London: Methuen & Co., 1926), pp. 268-9. 45 is feminine, and therefore bad, but when Eliot redefines criticism in 1919, only bad criticism is feminine. Eliot redeems literary criticism by making the exemplar masculine. The historical moment when academia professionalises literary criticism holds unique insights into the machinations of gender ideology because it coincides with women entering the professions. In 1919 The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act bans employers from discriminating against women in the workplace—at least in theory. Virginia Woolf claims in Three Guineas in 1938 that this is revolutionary, allowing women to break free from their menfolk and give them ‘an independent opinion based upon an independent income’.10 Previously, society did not consider it acceptable for middle- and upper-class women to work for money (apart from teaching in exceptional circumstances, as I will discuss). Indeed, Edith Morley states in her memoir that when she was at university at the turn of the century, ‘fathers and brothers felt it an insult to their manhood if their womenfolk suggested a “career”’ (p. 39). But Woolf is also critical of the professions as they currently operate. She says that their ‘distinctions’ (p. 181), ‘uniforms’, and ‘perquisites’ (p. 224) foster hierarchical communities and that the new expert critics have too much power. In an extended footnote, Woolf argues that

the violence with which one school of literature is now opposed to another, the rapidity with which one school of taste succeeds another, may not unreasonably be traced to the power which a mature mind lecturing immature minds has to infect them with strong, if passing, opinions, and to tinge those opinions with personal bias (pp. 379-380).

Woolf believes, unlike Eliot, that specialised expertise does not give professional critics permission to wield their intellect. She agrees with Eliot, however, that the ideal critic is impersonal. Later in the essay she restates the idea that professional work will give women an ‘independent opinion’, calling it a ‘disinterested’ influence (p. 174). But is a professional necessarily devoid of interests? Professionalism is rooted in notions of prestige and expertise; in other words, of exclusively apportioned knowledge and skills enshrined in qualifications and institutional reputations. It is a system that distinguishes professionals from the masses and from each other. Yet it professes impartiality. Baldick says that early critics believed they must practice a ‘form of objectivity’ (p. 114) with intellectual ‘professional partisanship’ (p. 115) rather than political affiliations. Gerald Graff says similarly that in American universities in the early twentieth century the ‘new academic professional thought of himself as an "investigator"’ who supposedly

10 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 236. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 46

‘transcended morality and ideology in his disinterested search for truth’.11 The professional is rather contradictory figure, then, who apparently has no material interests, yet benefits from many perks and perpetuates cultures of prestige. Thomas Strychacz argues that academia is an especially powerful profession, because it is adept at ‘the establishment of authoritative discourses’ by institutionalizing ‘specialized discourses and communities of competence’.12 Academia is notoriously insular and older universities are shrouded in prestige. It also educates other professionals and produces rigid measures such as degree classes. Does it really have the potential to help women discover their disinterested, independent intellects? Woolf believes that women can reform professional culture because they have yet to be initiated into its follies, saying that women can practise ‘chastity’ (modesty) and reject ‘unreal loyalties’ (prejudices) (p. 280). Morley’s and Leavis’s writing suggests, however, that early academic women had very little bargaining power with which to reform their profession. They were highly politicised: Morley undertook militant suffragist activism such as tax and census evasion and conducted research into professional women for the Fabian Society; Leavis reviewed Woolf’s essay on the professions and wrote articles on socialism and on nepotism in literary academia.13 But their awareness did not translate into material gains. In their life-writing they appear to be simply trying to survive or even to assimilate and their employment seems precarious. They appear to be less a professional, more a worker. In this chapter, I wish to revise, then, the notion that women entering the professions was ‘progress’ and to add two new voices to debates about women in the literary professions. Morley’s and Leavis’s academic communities both characterised them as ‘difficult’ and even women who came a generation afterwards mocked their predecessors. American scholar Marjorie Hope Nicolson, for example, expresses gratitude that she ‘came late enough to escape the self-consciousness and the belligerence of the pioneers’.14 Even Leavis’s contemporary at Cambridge, Muriel Bradbrook, herself of the pioneer generation, gently berates Mary Wollestonecraft for exhibiting the archetypal ‘capacity for self-dramatisation’ and ‘absurdities and heroics of a pioneer’.15 In this chapter, I examine that self-consciousness and

11 Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 62. 12 Thomas Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 22. 13 See Morley’s memoir and Leavis’s articles ‘Lady Novelists and the Lower Orders’ (1935), ‘Class-War Criticism’ (1937), ‘Caterpillars of the Commonwealth, Unite!’ (1938), and ‘The Discipline of Letters’ (1943). 14 Andrea Walton, ‘‘Scholar,’ ‘Lady,’ ‘Best Man in the English Department’? Recalling the Career of Marjorie Hope Nicolson’, History of Education Quarterly, 40.2 (2009), 169-200 (p. 169). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 15 Muriel Bradbrook, ‘Barbara Bodichon, George Eliot and the Limits of Feminism’, in Women and Literature 1779- 1982: The Collected Papers of Muriel Bradbrook, Vol. 2 (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), p. 50. 47 belligerence against academia’s expectation that professionals must be ‘impersonal’ or ‘disinterested’. Academia read pioneering women’s behaviour simultaneously against the script of conventional femininity and masculine professionalism and inevitably found it wanting. As I will go on to explore, Morley’s and Leavis’s experiences suggest that even deference was not always successful, because people interpreted their behaviour according to pre-determined impressions. Their self-narratives are often conflicted, I would argue as a result. They are self-deprecating and piously dogmatic in equal measure. Although they are painfully aware that their oppression is rooted in gender ideology, they often still appraise their own qualities and work according to conventionally gendered criteria. Morley argues in Women Workers in Seven Professions, for example, that greater rights would also make women better at their existing roles:

The woman who fulfils the claims of sex, and to do so journeys into the realm where life and death struggle for victory, cannot thereby be unfitted for the profession for which she has qualified. Enlargement of mind and new experience will help her too, in the daily routine.16

She wistfully continues that ‘[i]t is for her alone to decide whether new claims and old can be reconciled’ (p. 24). Various theorists have outlined the pioneer’s mentality, most notably sociologist Erving Goffman in his work on ‘stigma’ and ‘spoiled identity’.17 I discuss Goffman’s theories later in this chapter, alongside Sander Gilman’s work on Jewish communities, with which both Morley and Leavis had complicated relationships. While their theories are illuminating, I have reservations about their somewhat deterministic terminology, though, because the word ‘spoiled’ conveys a sense of irrevocable damage. In contrast, Morley’s and Leavis’s life-writing illustrates the extent to which the psychological toll of oppression is contingent on specific socio- political circumstances and usually demand continual responses. I therefore prefer M. Jeanne Peterson’s term ‘status incongruence’ and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s theories on ‘emotional management’, instead, because they describe, respectively, states and actions.18 These terms emphasise that oppressed groups continue to perform certain

16 Edith Morley, ed, Women Workers in Seven Professions: A Survey of Their Economic Conditions and Prospects (London: Routledge, 1914), p. 24. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 17 Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 18 M. Jeanne Peterson, ‘The Victorian Governess: Status Incongruence in Family and Society’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1, The Victorian Woman (Sep., 1970), 7-26 (p. 10); Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 7. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 48 behaviours in response to ongoing circumstances; these traits and social conditions are not permanent. Peterson explains, for example, that around the turn of the twentieth century some women could work without jeopardising their middle-class credentials:

if a woman of birth and education found herself in financial distress, and had no relatives who could support her or give her a home, she was justified in seeking the only employment that would not cause her to lose her status. She could find work as a governess. The position of governess seems to have been appropriate because, while it was paid employment, it was within the home. The governess was doing something she might have done as a wife under better circumstances. She avoided the immodest and unladylike position of public occupation (p. 10).

I believe that the term ‘status incongruence’ is also useful to describe women academics because it expresses the way that their decision to work and affected their class position and how gender affected the value of their work. Morley and Leavis do not fit neatly into definitions of the professional based on education, class status, or industry qualifications because, despite gaining many privileges, their employment remained instable. Their experiences therefore query how compatible the criteria of professionalism are with individuals and work that employers feminise. Hochschild’s term ‘emotional management’, which she interchanges with ‘emotion work’, is useful for describing the aspect of the pioneer’s politics relating to emotion. Hochschild defines ‘emotional management’ as ‘the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display’ (p. 7). As I will discuss, self-regulation is a key requirement of both the professional university and Eliot’s critical doctrine.

A Soft Subject

Professionalisation was the catalyst for Edith Morley’s dispute with Reading University in several respects. She was originally employed in 1903 to teach adult evening classes by Reading College, an institution that she describes in her memoir as being founded ‘to bring education of a University type within the reach of those who cannot go to university’ (p. 97). But in 1907 the college sought university status, moving away from vocational courses towards a more traditionally academic Oxbridge-style curriculum.19 As a result, it automatically promoted all the

19 See J. C. Holt, The University of Reading: The First Fifty Years (Reading: Reading University Press, 1977), p. 82. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. Morley says in 1940 that when she arrived at Reading there were ‘[h]ardly any books, no research board, very few students, a mere handful in each faculty, a large body of two-year “education diploma” students’. Edith Morley, ‘Reminiscences’, Tamesis, Vol 39, No.1 (1940-41), 4-5 (p. 5). 49 heads of the departments to professorships—except Morley. She explains in her memoir that she did not initially challenge the decision, because she believed that the professorship was only being awarded to ‘outstanding colleagues’, but later discovered that she was ‘the sole lecturer in charge of a subject who was to be omitted from the list’ (p. 115). She was also the sole woman in charge of a subject. Only after handing in her resignation did Reading finally offer Morley a professorship.20 According to official histories, this is the end of the story. The Reading University website, for example, states: ‘[a]fter working as a lecturer in English language and literature from 1903 to 1907 at Reading, she was awarded her professorship in English Language in 1908, becoming the first woman professor at a British university or university college’.21 An annual lecture is now held in her honour and in 2017 the Humanities and Social Sciences Building was renamed the Edith Morley Building.22 She is generally known as the first woman to be made a professor of any subject in an English university.23 But Morley’s dispute in fact continued for many years after she was awarded this prestigious position and came to a far less happy conclusion. The wording of the Reading University website biography in the main resembles the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry for Morley. But it omits some crucial details. Only the ODNB mentions, for example, that

the university succeeded in diminishing her achievement by awarding her a chair in English language, when literature was her main discipline. With literature given to a male professor, her chair ceased with her retirement. She was also denied a male assistant; the authorities recorded that no male academic could be expected to work under a woman.24

Correspondence between Morley and university management in her archive at Reading verifies this. When Reading awarded Morley the professorship they offered her the title ‘Professor of English Language’, despite ‘Language’ not being her field of expertise. Morley explains in a letter on 3rd March 1908 to the Principle, W. M. Childs, that the word connotes ‘philology’, or, historical linguistics. Yet Morley’s research was mostly on late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century

20 Morley writes to the Principle, W. M. Childs, on Feb 24th 1908: ‘I have therefore no alternative but resignation’. University of Reading, Special Collections, Correspondence of W. M. Childs, MS 2049. Further references to this collection are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 21 ‘Morley, Edith (professor)’ [accessed 10 August 2019]. 22 ‘Edith Morley: First female professor honoured at Reading’ [accessed 10 August 2019]. 23 See Carol Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?: Women in British Universities 1870-1939 (London: University College London Press, 1995), p. 139. 24 Cheryl Law, ‘Edith Morley’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2001-2004, ed. by Lawrence Goldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 50 writers such as Henry Crabb Robinson, Fanny Burney, and John Ruskin. Copies of the English syllabus in 1904-5 show that she taught three modules: ‘The Rise and Development of the English Essay’, including texts by Bacon, Montaigne, Hazlitt and De Quincey; ‘Carlyle, Ruskin and Matthew Arnold in relation to Modern Thought’; and ‘Byron, Shelley and Keats’ in their historical contexts, including ‘the French Revolution’.25 Later, Morley consults well-known literary scholar W. P. Ker, who agrees that the term ‘Language’ is ‘anomalous’ alongside her research publications.26 In a letter dated February 25th 1908, Morley tells Childs that she is ‘sorry to be obstinate about what appears to [him] a trifle, but academically the point is not so small as it seems.’ Childs replies on 2nd March urging Morley not to ‘stickle too much on comparatively minor points’; the next day she responds that if the point is indeed ‘nominal’, then there is no reason to deny her wishes. In late February Morley had twice suggested several alternative titles, including ‘Historical + Modern English’, ‘English Language + Literary Criticism’, ‘English Letters + Language’, or ‘English Criticism’.27 But Childs rejects them all, recommending in the March 2nd letter: “Professor of the English Language, + Lecturer in English Literature”. But, as Morley points out in her reply, ‘the definite article before the words ‘English Language’, in no way meets [her] objections to the original suggestion’ and if ‘Lecturer in Eng. Literature’ follows this also ‘makes it clear that ‘Language’ applies to philology alone’. As Morley explains, ‘[w]hen the two sides of the subject are definitely separated’, ‘Language’ connotes philology. Eventually, she conceded—for the time being. So why did the university press her to accept an inaccurate accolade? A 1912 private memo to the Dean of the Faculty of Letters, W. S. de Burgh, shows that Childs rejects ‘English’ because the university wants to employ a second professor alongside her—a man. Childs tells Morley on 2nd March that he must have ‘complete liberty to appoint whenever they think for a Professor of English Literature who shall not be restricted to any particular section of the subject’. He implies that a professor of ‘English’ would be superior to one of ‘English Literature’ because the former encompasses the latter, but does not accept Morley’s argument that ‘Language’ is a separate category to ‘Literature’. Morley explains in her reply the next day that if she accepts the professorship with the title ‘Lecturer in Literature’ she would then be ‘explicitly subordinate to the new man’ in her area of expertise. Childs also agrees that ‘the status of the two professorships shall be equal’, quoting Morley as previously saying that the university could appoint another

25 University of Reading, Special Collections, MS 938/7, ‘Guide to Evening Classes 1904-5’. 26 Childs quotes Ker’s comment in a letter to Morley dated 17 June 1912 (MS 938/1/15). 27 MS 938/1/15, Letters from Edith Morley to W. M. Childs 27 February 1908, 29 February 1908. 51

‘special professor to that part of the work for which [she is] unfitted’.28 This should mean that the new professor has experience in philology, but when they appoint another professor in 1912, this is not the case. Reading assigns a new ‘Professor of English Literature’ instead, on the basis that they already have a Professor of English Language. They thus dilute Morley’s authority in her own field. Although Childs denies that the university’s decisions are politically motivated, the private memo from 1912 shows that this is not true. Here de Burgh acknowledges that Morley’s ‘interests lie rather in the literary side of the subject than in the philological’, but states that they should only change her title ‘if her subordination to the new Professor were explicitly recognized’.29 Reading’s aim was clearly to suppress Morley’s authority. This has never been publicly discussed before. What has also never been discussed before is how a professorship in ‘Language’ made her implicitly subordinate too. The reason for this is that literary studies was moving away from philology and refashioning linguistic criticism as irrelevant and outmoded— and feminine. But philology was not always feminine. As I mention earlier, Sir Walter Raleigh describes all literary criticism as ‘an emotion for spinsters’. Many early scholars saw linguistic study as the ‘grit’ of language-based study, such as Cambridge scholar F. L. Lucas, who says in 1933 that Classics is ‘saved from the effeminacy of many aesthetic pursuits by its linguistic difficulty’.30 He says that he risks getting ‘publicly stoned’, however, for thinking that literary professors should only teach the historical ‘knowledge and the understanding without which judgments of literature are impossible’ (p. 290), because attitudes towards historical linguistics are changing. When English studies becomes a separate subject, historical linguistics goes from being rigorous scholarship to impotent esoterism, and aesthetic evaluations gain intellectual clout—and masculine connotations. By 1958, Cambridge historian E. M. W. Tillyard, for example, pejoratively links linguistics to characteristically feminine traits and women’s sexual status. He attributes the methods of one of his Cambridge colleagues, Miss Steele Smith, with her personality and sexuality, saying that she was ‘a timid old-maidish little scholar’ and ‘[i]t was partly her timidity that kept her a philologist’.31 The shift in the gender of criticism has another

28 MS 938/1/15, Letter from W. M. Childs to Edith Morley 2 March 1908. 29 MS 2049, Memo by the Dean of the Faculty of Letters W. S. de Burgh, 20 June 1912. 30 F. L. Lucas, ‘English Literature’, in University Studies: Cambridge, 1933, ed. by Harold Wright (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1933), pp. 259-294 (p. 289). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 31 E. M. W. Tillyard, The Muse Unchained: An Intimate Account of the Revolution in English Studies at Cambridge (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1958), pp. 46-7. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 52 context, too. As Baldick explains, the fact that academic linguistics originated in Germany became contentious during the two world wars and universities became hostile towards all kinds of Germanic culture. Baldick quotes Walter Raleigh, for example, claiming that ‘German University culture is mere evil’ and Arthur Quiller-Couch stating that literary criticism is something German scholars ‘can never practice nor even see as an art’.32 Virginia Woolf’s ‘angry professor’ in Three Guineas, who makes up misogynistic pseudo-science, is notably Professor Von X (p. 26). Cambridge scholar Basil Willey claims that English studies emerged out of a ‘War of Independence whereby English became an autonomous discipline, free from all alien tyrannies and ancient prejudices’, especially the ‘alien yoke of Teutonic philology’.33 Inaugurating English studies was a conscious move away from studying ‘foreign’ methodologies as well as languages. In this period literary academia’s impressions of Germanic and feminine intellectual traits align. In Christopher Hobhouse’s 1939 memoir of Oxford, for example, he derides women undergraduates for their ‘truly Teutonic respect for their own dons’.34 Men frequently described women students as obsequious, overly-eager workers in this era (as I discuss in more detail in chapter three), but here Hobhouse makes a specific nod to the German’s apparent obsequiousness to Nazi authoritarianism. Philology’s diligence and meticulousness is now a pejorative. This is relevant to Morley’s negotiations at Reading in several respects. Reading can clearly exploit disciplinary tensions within English studies without seeming to discriminate. Universities can profess critical professionalism whilst engaging in subtle anti-feminist and xenophobic discourse. Because this discourse is intellectual, it is particularly difficult for Morley to argue that Reading’s title is deliberately discriminatory and she appears aggressive and unreasonable as a result. In essence, professionalism prohibits her ability to self-advocate.

A Rogue Professor

In many ways, Morley was an adept professional. She wrote in some of the first academic literary journals, such as Review of English Studies, and sat on the Executive of the newly formed English Association and the Board of Studies in Mediæval and Modern Languages at the University of London.35 As Morley says in her memoir, when Reading initially declined her request for a

32 Baldick quotes Raleigh, Letters, 474 and Quiller-Couch, Studies in Literature, 231-245 (p. 88). 33 Badlick quotes Willey, Cambridge and Other Memories, 23-4 (p. 86). 34 Christopher Hobhouse, Oxford: As it was and as it is today (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1939), p. 101. 35 There is a brief biography of Morley’s professional achievements in an article announcing the publication of her research on ‘Women Workers in Seven Professions’ in Fabian News, Vol. XXV., No. 5. April, 1914, p. 34. 53 professorship she had been ‘solely responsible for the organization and for almost all the teaching of the subject’ for twelve years (p. 114). Even de Burgh describes Morley as a ‘good lecturer’ and a ‘very hard worker’. But her personality and her pedagogical values clashed with those of the new, professionalised institution. Morley continued to run adult evening classes after the college became a university, which she explains had an unusually collaborative format: ‘[t]utor and class discuss and, as far as may be, arrange the syllabus and subjects of study together’ (p. 129). Holt quotes Morley saying in a 1926 memo that full-time university students should have ‘free choice’ over their examination texts and that Reading should run ‘modern subjects’ instead of trying to introduce a curriculum that emulates older universities.36 She also (unsuccessfully) opposed the university adding another layer of non-academic management in 1913-16 (pp. 28-9). Morley believed that her mistreatment was the result of Reading’s attempts to raise its reputation. She says in her memoir that Reading was ‘a young and struggling institution with its reputation still in the making’ and, she believes, was therefore ‘afraid it might suffer if it risked being the first in the British Isles to give to a woman the title of professor’ (p. 115). Contrary to T. S. Eliot’s beliefs, then, her hard work meant little when she would not use it to serve the aims of the professionalised university. Morley’s dedication also did not cushion her from judgments about her character. Four years later, she resumes negotiations. She had written to Childs in 1908 that she could ‘reasonably claim freedom to reconsider [her] position […] when the second professorship is made’ (8 March). But when she tries to negotiate a different title in 1912 Childs finds this unacceptable. In a letter dated 18 June, Childs describes her actions as ‘perpetual or intermittent agitation’. As punishment, the management go back on their earlier agreement and make the new male Professor of English Literature officially superior to Morley.37 Farcically, then, Morley gains a professorship, but gets demoted, and the department technically has two heads of ‘Language’, yet neither of them can teach it. While Morley had valid reasons to ask for an accurate title, university management quashed her demands by claiming she was unreasonable. The university’s response mirrors how sociologist Erving Goffman describes the regulation of social norms and the psychological repercussions for those who fail to meet them. Goffman says that if a person’s race, gender, class, or physical or mental abilities do not fit a society’s model subjecthood they gain ‘stigma’. A stigmatised person can receive various kinds of social abuse such as discrimination, ostracization, or dismissal, but society will view them as the deviant party. Goffman explains that even tolerance upholds social norms because it makes it

36 Holt quotes ‘Memorandum of Edith Morley’, 19 November 1926 (p. 82). 37 See MS 938/1/15, Letters from Edith Morley to W. M. Childs, 4, 17, and 19 July 1912. 54 implicitly known that there is something to be tolerated; a person with stigma ‘should not test the limits of the acceptance shown them, nor make it the basis for still further demands’ (p. 146) or they will become seen as ‘an impaired person, rigid, defensive, with inadequate inner resources’ (p. 140). Sara Ahmed has also recently discussed this phenomenon in her work on institutional complaints procedures. She explains that, for universities, ‘[w]hen we give problems their names, we can become a problem’.38 This is precisely what happens to Morley at Reading. When she contests the conditions of her professorship she is seen as emotional and unreasonable; in other words, unprofessional. Deference and diplomacy, which Goffman calls the ‘imagery of mental hygiene’ (p. 140), are pervasive in the management’s language. Childs, for example, dismisses Morley’s concerns about her title again in a letter from 22 June 1912, saying they are based on ‘merely personal considerations’. Even if Morley’s motivation is solely ‘personal’ (i.e., to accurately reflect her area of expertise) then it was entirely valid, but the fact that the management eventually hire another literature specialist suggests that they are using methodological distinctions deceptively. The real reason they demote her is that they don’t like her attitude. Childs says in a 1912 memo that Morley was not initially made a professor because ‘she had not the requisite qualifications for a Professorship of English Literature’’. It is true that Morley only had a less well-regarded ‘honorary degree’ in English (p. 31). But, as she explains in her memoir, she had been ‘entirely ignorant’ about the differences in the ‘degree examination’ (p. 32) because her family were reluctant to formally educate her. Indeed, it was difficult for any woman to get a full degree in 1899, when she started at Bedford. But very few literary academics had in fact studied English at this point, because the discipline was such a recent invention. Tillyard mentions that at Cambridge, for example, ‘up to October 1923 no lecturer destined to a permanent appointment in the English Faculty had taken the English Tripos’ (p. 101). Morley was actually more qualified to be a literary professor than Quiller-Couch or Raleigh. According to the university’s own ideas of professionalism Morley was a successful academic, but Reading did not consider her training or experience sufficient to compensate for her psychological transgressions. In a memo dated 20 June 1912, de Burgh says:

The governing consideration in this matter seems to me to be the fact that Professor Morley has shown herself lacking in qualities essential to a share in the headship of an important department of College work. We are preparing for a university and it is of great importance that English shall be in the charge of a teacher fully capable of undertaking responsibility. Such a teacher must possess, in addition to other qualities,

38 Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 34. 55

those of judgment and discretion. […] If the future of English is prejudiced now, it is prejudiced for many years to come (MS 2049).

Reading’s qualifications for being a literary professor, then, are being ‘responsible’, possessing ‘judgment’, and demonstrating ‘discretion’. But Morley was clearly a responsible teacher; what de Burgh refers to is the performance of neutrality; the regulation of emotion. Yet, in Morley’s situation, discretion would amount to obsequiousness. When she acts in her own interests, they consider her to be ‘prejudiced’. The official history of Reading University echoes this view. Holt expresses surprise that Morley ‘attracted some kind of sympathetic affection in her students’ (p. 276), because, as he claims, the university saw her as ‘difficult’ (p. 89), ‘formidable’, ‘provocative, disturbing, aggressive, and intransigent’ (p. 88). These are patently different impressions of the same person. Although Morley only asks for an accurate title and to retain her existing authority, because she asks for more than the institution is willing to give they paint her as unreasonable. Ultimately, she earned herself a reputation among university management as a ‘rogue professor’ (p. 276). When university management deems Morley a philologist, they feminise her in the eyes of the academic community. When they brand her as an emotional agitator, they feminise her in their own eyes. In both cases, they exploit stereotypes about gendered traits to reduce her institutional influence. The fact that they feel that any demand beyond the original professorship is unreasonable suggests that they felt that they had been generous in the first place. But Morley only asks for them not to discriminate against her; for parity with her colleagues and an accurate title. Morley’s experiences suggest that women in academia at this time could not be ‘impersonal’ or ‘disinterested’. They could not embody professional or political neutrality because they had to assert their own interests to gain anything from their institutions. This made them much more vulnerable to their employers. Morley threatens to resign several times during 1908 and 1912, using the only bargaining power available to a worker: withdrawing one’s labour. Reading retaliates with equally aggressive action: during the negotiations Morley reduces her working hours due to stress, but when she asks for them to be raised again for financial reasons in July 1912, the management refuse. Reading continually assert their power as her employer, yet ask Morley to accept their demands with gratitude and grace. What can Morley’s story tell us, then, about gender in early literary academia? The story of the first woman professor of English in the U.K. is a crucial episode missing from histories of the discipline, such as Baldick’s Social Mission of English Criticism (1984). As I have shown, English studies is clearly formed through the feminisation of philology and the rhetoric of professional 56 emotional regulation. Contrary to Woolf’s claims, Morley was more vulnerable and undervalued under the new professional regime at Reading than when it was a vocational college. Her story is only one account, of course, but women were exceptions in literary academia in many institutions for many years to come. Academic English studies’ hostility towards feminised qualities and methods created a climate in which these early women scholars were underpaid, undervalued, and confined by gender stereotypes.

A Profession So Arduous

This section looks at how the feminisation of teaching also contributed to universities seeing women scholars’ work as less important. As Morley’s experiences at Reading and Lucas’s comments on Leavis’s enthusiasm suggest, academia perceived industry and spiritedness differently in people who did not fit the professional mould. Teaching was one of the most common occupations for women in the early twentieth century, but, as Morley explains in her chapter on academia in Women Workers in Seven Professions, it remains ‘a profession so arduous, so full of drudgery and of disappointment’ (p. 12).39 Morley says that ‘it is now almost universally recognised that teaching is a profession’ (p. 1), but teaching in universities remained the poor relation of research. Marjorie Hope Nicolson comments that in American universities ‘[i]ntense professionalization’ at the turn of the twentieth century caused ‘“an artificial and serious distinction between research and scholarship on the one hand, and teaching and education on the other”’ (pp. 197-8). Commenting on Nicolson’s career, Andrea Walton states that the scholar has to perform a ‘dual, and overall contradictory role’ (p. 185). I argue in this section that academia genders this contradiction. Jessica Feldman points out that teaching is feminine even when it is not performed by women. Feldman discusses how in the late Victorian period men of letters or public intellectuals such as Charles Dickens and Arthur Quiller-Couch would tour the country orating to enrapt audiences. Feldman argues that the public lecture circuit seemed feminine, because it was associated with the ‘‘helping’ professions’ and the ‘private devotional sphere’, yet even when literary instruction entered the university it maintains its feminine status because, unlike research,

39 Morley states that according to the 1911 census (which many women boycotted to protest their lack of a vote), there are 187,283 women teachers, 477 surgeons, 83,662 midwives and nurses, 19,437 Poor Law and municipal workers, 31,538 government employees, 117,057 shop attendants, and 9,171 actresses (p. 315). 57 it is intrinsically collaborative and ephemeral.40 Morley tells us in Women Workers in Seven Professions that, in her era, English departments usually give women an excessive share of the teaching work and that women often gladly take it on to try to prove they are worthy. In typical pioneer fashion, she warns women not to invest too much time in teaching, though, because it confirms the stereotype that women are better suited to this kind of work. She says that a women scholar is usually

too conscientious about detail, too interested in her students individually and collectively, to secure sufficient time for her own studies. If a lecturer be known to teach between twenty and thirty hours a week, it is tolerably, though not entirely, safe to assume that it is a woman who is so foolish. In so doing, she is destroying her chances of advancement— intellectual and professional—and laying her whole sex open to the charge of being unsuited to university work except in its lower branches (pp. 16-17).41

By working too hard, women paradoxically betray their status as hacks, amateurs, or otherwise intellectually deficient. Other scholars joined Eliot in branding women teachers amateurs of letters. In correspondence with Sir Walter Raleigh in 1912, Austen scholar R. W. Chapman calls school teacher and author of several books on public reading habits, Amy Cruse, “an ambitious school-marm”.42 The literary professions may demand hard work, but work that it feminises never quite counts. The fact that women were given disproportionate amounts of teaching suggests that this occupation causes what Denise Riley calls a ‘double feminisation’, whereby a practice or quality with feminine connotations confines women to gendered tropes.43 Riley is talking about how women entering social work in the early twentieth century are ‘solidly inside of that which has to some degree already been feminised’, because, although social work was a new formal occupation, it effectively professionalised ‘concerns of the social’ historically undertaken by women anyway (p. 51). I would argue that the same is true for women teaching literature in this period, because literary studies formalises the middle- and upper- class cultural education a

40 Jessica Feldman, Victorian Modernism: Pragmatism and the Varieties of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 190. 41 Marjorie Hope Nicolson agrees. According to Andrea Walton, Nicolson feels that most academic women are “overconscientious”, “pedants and plodders” capable of being “competent teachers” but not scholars (p. 187). 42 Letter from R. W. Chapman to Walter Raleigh, August 30, 1912; Letter from Walter Raleigh to R. W. Chapman, August 31, 1912, quoted in Patrick Buckridge, ‘The Fate of an “Ambitious School-Marm”: Amy Cruse and the History of Reading’, Book History Vol. 16 (2013), 272-293 (p. 274). 43 Denise Riley, Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 51. 58 mother would often provide.44 But whereas the profession of social work was already feminised by its proximity to moral and domestic concerns, academia was, in the main, masculine. The fact that teaching within academia retains its feminine connotations therefore suggests that the gender of work trumps the gender of the institution. Indeed, academia’s intellectual machismo creates what feminist theorists such as Michèle Barrett call the ‘sexual division of labour’, wherein tasks are assigned according to notions of natural aptitude (for example, mothering).45 Once, as Marjorie Hope Nicolson explains, academia created ‘“an artificial and serious distinction between research and scholarship on the one hand, and teaching and education on the other”’, the teacher’s lower status solidified. The gendered partition of academic tasks easily maps onto literary archetypes, too. The eccentric professor alone in his ivory tower translates as the solitary, tormented poet; the diligent teacher as the dutiful typist. Eliot’s literary ‘specialist’ has a distinct singularity of being as well as ‘singleness of purpose’. In other words, he is a new incarnation of the literary genius.46 In Morley’s era, women students were often depicted as working without flare, insight, or direction. In L. T. Meade’s university novel, The Girls of Merton College (1911), for example, one male student says that the women ‘“work like horses and dress like frumps.”’47 Pamela Thurschwell and Leah Price argue that the notion of the singular literary genius emerges from the fact that ‘ideas of the literary are formed not just by analogy with more mundane kinds of writing, but in opposition to them’.48 The university clearly endorses intellectual opposition. It rewards individual research output such as publications and then compounds the differential by awarding prolific publishers time off from teaching to conduct more research. Gender is implicit in these priorities. Wrestling with poems and theories is apparently more noble than grappling with students’ woes. In Morley’s day, few allowances were made for the extra commitments women were likely to have, such as childcare, and so they found it difficult to progress towards stable employment (as I discuss later in relation to Q. D. Leavis). Thurschwell and Price also claim that,

44 Woolf bemoans this phenomenon in Three Guineas: ‘A lamentable proof of the mental docility to which the young are reduced by lecturers in that the demand for lectures upon English literature steadily increases (as every writer can bear witness) and from the very class which should have learnt to read at home—the educated’ (p. 380). 45 Michèlle Barrett, ‘Gender and the Division of Labour’, in Women’s Oppression Today, 3rd edn (London: Verso, 2014), p. 152. 46 Sander Gilman discusses how oppressed people are often cast as toiling away without talent. Gilman quotes Otto Weininger claiming that both Jewish people and women have “no genius”. Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 133. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 47 L. T. Meade, Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Vol 2: The Girls of Merton College, ed. by Anna Bogen (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2015), p. 34. 48 Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell, eds., Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 2. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 59 as a result of literary culture’s oppositional nature, in the creative literary industries the ‘opposite of genius is typist’ (p. 2). I would argue that in academia the opposite of genius is teacher. Morley, the characteristic pioneer, downplays her intellectual abilities. In her memoir, she says:

I was a successful lecturer and teacher; I possessed the makings of a tolerable scholar and I was already engaged upon research work of importance. But I knew that I had no claim to outstanding intellectual gifts and that it was beyond my power to produce original work of a high order (p. 115).

While it is true that Morley never produced famous works of criticism, she made a substantial contribution to scholarship on Henry Crabb Robinson. Indeed, there are various letters in her archive congratulating her on her work on Crabb Robinson’s correspondence, including one from Childs dated 3 November 1938, who says: ‘Your place in English letters is secure!’ (MS 938/1/15). This was not to be true; Morley is practically unknown today. Regardless of Morley’s scholarly abilities, it is notable that she sees teaching to be less important than research. Even though she is conducting research ‘of importance’, she only sees herself as a ‘tolerable’ scholar. Even though she believes she is a ‘successful’ teacher, she does not think that she has ‘outstanding intellectual gifts’. But why is a flair for pedagogy not an intellectual gift? Why does she see her work to be important but her ideas to be unoriginal? I believe the answer is because her discipline and her institution position teaching (like philology) as a foil to their new professionalised, masculine image.49 Although Morley is modest about teaching’s capacity to be intellectual work, she clearly values it as an experience. In Women Workers in Seven Professions, she describes it as work characterised by an ‘absence of finality’ (p. 19), where one is continually ‘experimenting with new methods’ (p. 20). Recent critiques of the university also argue that pedagogy’s inchoate, unquantifiable nature has radical potential. In Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s theory of the university and the ‘undercommons’, they argue that ‘‘the beyond of teaching’’, or, the pedagogical possibilities beyond the university’s professional aims, can help us think ‘towards a collective orientation’.50 They also remind us that before all intellectual achievements – graduation, publication, tenure – ‘teaching happened’ (p. 27). Morley also found teaching a site

49 Morley states in her chapter on women in academia in Women Workers in Seven Professions that ‘a woman must be exceptionally qualified and far more distinguished than her male competitors to stand a chance of a professorial appointment even in the most liberal of co-education universities’ (pp. 15-16). 50 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), pp. 26-27. 60 of political struggle from the very beginning. When she and Caroline Spurgeon had just graduated, they used their own financial security to improve working conditions for poorer teachers. As Morley explains in her memoir, they refused the University of London’s low rate of pay, and, as a result,

The woman who was ultimately appointed was offered nearly double the sum we had rejected. We used this instance as a proof that it was useful for women not absolutely dependent on their earnings to enter the labour market since only they could stand out against sweating (p. 95).

Morley also tries to help women entering teaching by publishing Women Workers in Seven Professions, where she collects information such as current rates of pay and available grants. Her commitment to adult education, to collaborative learning, and to improving her own and others’ working conditions, all suggest that teaching has the potential to resist professionalization, to contest the iconography of esoteric men pouring over obscure manuscripts in ivory towers. I would argue, then, that Morley’s dispute over her title is important not because she became the first woman professor, but because she makes her case despite believing that she is an exceptional teacher— which in academia’s eyes means she is not exceptional at all. Indeed, the first woman to be made a professor of English in the U.K. is T. S. Eliot’s worst nightmare: a tolerable scholar teaching adult education.

The One Great Profession

The professional circumstances of Q. D. Leavis, another pioneering woman to study literature, provide an illuminating comparison to Morley’s. In the rest of this chapter, I want to develop my discussion of the aspects of professionalism that arise in Morley’s experiences, emotion regulation and the gendered division of intellectual tasks, in a different setting. As with Morley, institutional precarity and provisional professional status defined Leavis’s working life. Leavis taught at Cambridge’s two women’s colleges, Girton and Newnham, at various points in her career, but never secured a permanent position.51 Unlike Morley, though, her professional issues were also domestic. Leavis is known for writing Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) and many articles on the novel, but is probably most famous, regrettably, as the wife of F. R. Leavis. While various

51 Girton’s Director of Studies notebook show that Q. D. Roth started teaching in 1929, the year after she graduated (GCAC 2/2/9), and Varney tells Jan Montefiore that her mother taught Newnham in the 1960s (p. 180). 61 scholars describe the Leavises as partners or collaborators, as I will discuss, they rarely consult Q. D. Leavis’s assessment of the relationship. In this section, I explore how Leavis’s life-writing explores domestic labour using terms correlating with later feminist theories, such as availability, invisibility, emotional management, multi-tasking, and desire. In practice, this meant that Leavis did extensive editorial and secretarial work for her husband, which, I argue later in this chapter, is due to a gendered division of intellectual labour. Leavis was part of a distinct and well-known phenomenon within academia at the time: the scholar’s wife.52 Virginia Woolf makes a glib comment in Three Guineas that marriage is ‘the one great profession open to our class since the dawn of time until the year 1919 [when the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act became law]’ (p. 158). But the role of the scholar’s wife practically was a formal occupation; wives usually undertook their husband’s editing, typing, and facilitated their networking by hosting social gatherings.53 Leavis describes what she believes makes a good scholar’s wife in a letter to David Craig in 1955. She says: ‘I hope you will marry a woman of character and with a sense of what is entailed in being wife to an intellectual (chiefly a great deal of patience and forbearance, I think)’.54 Her definition is strikingly psychological and her terms – patience, forbearance, character – all suggest stoicism. It appears that marriage demands from Leavis what the university demands from Morley: channelling one’s emotions into diplomatic statements, self-deprecation, or wry humour. These strategies correlate with Arlie Russell Hochschild’s theories on ‘emotional management’, or, ‘the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display’ in a private setting (p. 7). Like Morley, Leavis has to muster a gendered psychological repertoire to be a literary professional, but unlike Morley, Leavis’s workplace is her home. Leavis is therefore quite literally the butt of Woolf’s joke; as well as being a professional in her own right, she is a professional wife. Leavis was not an advocate of the feminist movement, but her reflections on married life show an astute understanding of how gender ideologies inform her personal and professional

52 Like fellow Cambridge English academics Nora Kershaw and Hector Munro Chadwick, Joan and Stanley Bennett, and many others, Leavis met her husband whilst being taught by him. Teacher-pupil relationships feature in many university novels of the time. See Paul Knobel, ‘Chadwick, Nora (1891–1972)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Gilbert Frankau, Self-Portrait (London: Hutchinson, 1940), p. 234; Ivy Compton-Burnett, Dolores (Edinburgh; London: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1911); Storm Jameson, A Cup of Tea for Mr Thorgill (London: Macmillan & Co., 1957). 53 Edward Fiess explains that the American equivalent, the ‘faculty wife’, would ‘compile indexes, heap up footnotes, amass bibliographies, copyread, proofread, check statistics, correct computations, conduct correspondence, catalogue reference materials, and digest articles in foreign periodicals.’ Edward Fiess, "To My Wife, without Whose Help..."; A Preface to Professorial Prefaces", Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors (1915-1955), Vol. 38, No. 1 (Spring, 1952), 71-73 (p.72). 54 Girton College Archive, Personal Papers of Q. D. Leavis, GCPP Leavis 2/1/7: Letter from Q D Leavis to David Craig, 23 November 1955. Further references to this collection are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 62 relationships.55 Her descriptions of domestic labour as affective and all-pervading correlate with critiques by Silvia Federici and Angela Davis several decades later. Angela Davis notes that housework is ‘virtually invisible’ as work, because society assumes that women enjoy the tasks involved with being a wife and mother.56 Federici argues that it is precisely this combination of desire and labour, or, ‘the fact that other people's lives depend on us, or the impossibility to see where our work begins and ends, where our work ends and our desires begin’ that makes the assumption that women will perform this work exploitative.57 It removes the possibility for affective ambivalence. Leavis (or, Roth, at this point) expresses such ambivalence in a letter to a friend, Cynthia Thyne, dated 14 August 1929, about her imminent betrothal. She boasts that she is already ‘a most experienced cook-housekeeper, + full of ideas about how to feed the brute’ (GCPP Leavis 2/1/1). She appears to want to undertake domestic work, but her language is not wholly positive. The word ‘brute’ playfully suggests that she is appeasing a monster – but doing it willingly. Leavis employs knowing humour to deal with the contradictions of gendered social roles. By 1959, however, Leavis’s ambivalence has disappeared. In a letter to F. R. Leavis’s niece, Mary Pitter, she warns that ‘one has to resign oneself to being completely indispensable and staying put once one is a single-handed mother’. 58 She says that she ‘never had any time’ and elsewhere that she spent ‘all [her] time and activities to raise a family, make a home, and act as Frank [R. Leavis]’s typist-collaborator’. She then adds that the ‘cure’ is a husband who accepts ‘the partnership principle’, a phrase I will return to later in the chapter. Rather than mentioning specific tasks, then, Leavis talks about the affective qualities of her domestic arrangement. She complains about not having any time, being continually available, and managing multiple responsibilities. This correlates with how Federici describes domestic labour as not simply consisting of physical tasks such as cleaning and cooking, but an affective relation towards the people for whom that work is done. Leavis’s lack of time, for example, allows her husband to command his own. There are no spatial boundaries between her home and work life, either. Leavis’s daughter, Kate Varney, says, for example, that F. R. ‘used to take over any space he

55 Victoria Stewart notes that in Leavis’s essay on ‘Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century’ (published in Volume 3 of the Collected Essays in 1989) she claims the feminist movement has become cut off from ‘the first-hand sources of […] sympathetic human experience’. Victoria Stewart, ‘Q. D. Leavis: Women and Education under Scrutiny’, Literature and History: A New Journal for the Humanities, 13.2 (2004), 67-85 (p.84). 56 Angela Davis, ‘The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework’ in Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981), p. 223. 57 Silvia Federici, Wages against Housework (Bristol: Falling Wall Press for the Power of Women Collective, 1975), p. 6. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 58 Girton College Archive, GCPP Leavis 1/3/3/2, Letter from Q. D. Leavis to Mary Pitter (niece of F. R. Leavis), 1 July 1959. 63 could’ and whereas they ‘always had a house with a study for him’, Q. D. ‘used the dining-room table or worked in the sitting room’.59 As Varney comments, ‘she just fitted it in, as women often do’ (p. 179). Domestic work may be invisible, but it seeps through the home, in which the temporal and spatial boundaries of women’s work are highly porous. Leavis’s editorial work further muddies the grey area between work and leisure, home and office. Natalia Cecire makes a comparison between domestic and editorial work, saying that for ‘the many wives who typed their husbands’ manuscripts, such work was a form of unwaged domestic labor’.60 Intangible and assistive, editing is similarly ‘prone to being naturalized and thereby rendered invisible’ (p. 291). Leavis – a typical exceptional woman – claims on several occasions that she did all her husband’s typing. As well as telling Mary Pitter that she acts as ‘Frank’s typist-collaborator’, Varney, too, says:

She did all my father’s typing, you see, and a lot of Scrutiny typing […] editing at the same time. And all my father’s books too. And she contributed to his books as well—coming back with references and suggestions (p. 179).

Like the students who ‘work like horses’ and the academics who take on too much teaching, Leavis is exhaustively industrious. As a result, her own bibliography is slim and her publications are mostly short and subsidiary to others, such as reviews, introductions to new editions, footnotes, or sections of works co-authored with her husband.61 Tellingly, the only book she authored alone is her thesis, Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), which she completed mostly before she married. Thurschwell explains that emotional management is a crucial part of the secretary’s job description too:

The perfect secretary imbibes information and regurgitates it, but not automatically. […] the best medium is not herself unmediating. She identifies and sympathises – changes rather than simply transmits information.62

59 Jan Montefiore and Kate Varney, ‘A Conversation About Q. D. Leavis’, Women: A Cultural Review, 19.2 (2008), 172-187 (p. 179). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 60 Natalia Cecire, ‘Ways of Not Reading Gertrude Stein’, ELH, 82.1 (2015), 281-312 (p. 297). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 61 For a bibliography of Q.D. Leavis’s published work, see J. R. D. Fernández, ‘Q. D. Leavis: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources’, Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 7 (1994), 213-39. 62 Pamela Thurschwell, ‘Supple Minds and Automatic Hands: Secretarial Agency in Early Twentieth-Century Literature’, Forum for Modern Language Studies xxxvii.2 (2001), (155–168), p. 156. 64

This is precisely how Varney describes Leavis working: ‘typing’ whilst ‘editing at the same time’ and ‘coming back with references and suggestions’. Leavis says that she provided encouragement at every stage of the process. For example, Leavis writes in her unfinished memoir claims that she would often recommend him reading material. She explains in the memoir that in order to get F. R. Leavis to re-appraise George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda, she suggests he re-read her copy:

all the good things in the ‘Gwendolen Harleth’ part I had marked marginally so that he should take some of the points, and mentioned (tactfully but unaggressively) some praise of the achievement as I understood it. This was successful: he was soon convinced that he had discovered a great novel.63

It is an impressive feat to suggest ideas with such subtlety that the other person believes they have formulated them. Various scholars accuse Leavis of being domineering, including Nicolas Tredell, who writes that there is a ‘contradiction in Q. D. Leavis’s career between self-subordination and forthright aggression’.64 But, if she can switch from withering prose to verbal encouragement, perhaps she possesses more emotional dexterity than her critics credit her with. There is certainly evidence of such responsiveness in Leavis’s self-narratives. Her use of hyphenated, composite terms to describe herself is striking. In 1929 Leavis sees herself as a ‘cook- housekeeper’, in 1959 as a ‘typist-collaborator’. In another letter to Pitter dated 8 July 1961, she explains that an offer to teach at Newnham ‘means a steady grind of housework plus study (GCPP Leavis 1/3/3/2, my emphasis)’. Her descriptors are strikingly different to labels like ‘wife’, ‘housewife’, or ‘mother’, because they refer to the actual tasks involved. They are also the label one would use to describe these tasks if they were paid jobs. Is Leavis implicitly arguing, then, as Federici does several decades later, that women should receive ‘wages for housework’ (p. 4)? Federici claims that domestic exploitation is a material issue, with capitalist and patriarchal ideology working hand-in-hand to make this work appear to be not, in fact, work. She says that ‘[t]he fact that housework is unwaged has given this socially imposed condition an appearance of naturality (“femininity”)’.65 Leavis’s task-based labels could therefore be seen as a form of verbal resistance to the idea of a natural, feminine, domestic role, as well as its lack of boundaries. There is also resistance in Leavis’s statement to Mary Pitter that she ‘acts as’ her husband’s typist. To act as implies that Leavis is not his typist. Again, her linguistic choices suggest

63 G. S. Singh, F. R. Leavis: A Literary Biography, with Q. D. Leavis’s “Memoir” of F. R. Leavis (London: Duckworth, 1995), p. 27. 64 Nicolas Tredell, ‘I’m Not Complaining: Q. D. Leavis and Woman’s Estate’, PN Review, 38, Volume 10, Number 6 (May-June 1984), 37-38 (p. 37). 65 Silvia Federici, ‘Counterplanning from the Kitchen’, Revolution at Point Zero (Oakland, Ca.: PM Press, 2012), p. 16. 65 an awareness that the status of her work depends upon a gender relation. She is not a typist in an official sense because she works for duty, not pay. Ben Knights also explores Leavis’s performance of professional services by describing her as a ‘para-professional’, which the OED defines as a person ‘to whom a particular aspect of a professional task is delegated, but who is not licensed to practise as a fully qualified professional’.66 This is an apt description of Leavis’s relationship to professionalism: she may even perform the same tasks as her husband, but because his career came first her role is assistive. Knights’s word evokes Gérard Genette’s theory of ‘paratexts’, which Genette uses to describe how texts such as titles, prefaces, notes, and blurbs broadly have the same aim: to steer a central text’s reception. Leavis’s oeuvre is replete with these kinds of texts. Genette argues that paratexts have an important function, noting that they are ‘dedicated to the service of something other than itself’ and ‘a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, an influence on the public’.67 Like Thurschwell, Genette shines a spotlight on the fragmentary, collaborative, and invisible work that goes into creating a text that may appear to only have a single author. Paratexts’ dependency on other texts gives them a unique functionality; their value lies in their ancillary nature. I would argue, then, that paratexts’ combination of support and persuasion makes them the textual equivalent of the scholar’s wife. Leavis performs her most poignant feat of emotional dexterity regarding her health. For several decades she suffered from breast cancer, having a double mastectomy between 1947-49 and undergoing a rudimentary kind of radiotherapy in 1955 that left her with severe burns and an open wound.68 Yet, in the 1961 letter to Pitter, she mentions: ‘there is still some more diseased bone in my chest that must be removed. […] I haven’t broken the news to the family yet because there seems no point in upsetting Frank when the situation is insoluble’. For Leavis, the intensity and irreparability of the situation is a reason not to seek support through it. Leavis is clearly aware that academia is a hostile environment for people with ailing bodies, saying to writer Storm Jameson in 1948: ‘the professionals do not conceal from me that they take a poor view of a woman who develops a cancer at the age of thirty-eight’ (my emphasis).69 It is cruelly apt, then, that when Newnham propose Leavis for a fellowship in the 1960s, Varney reports that the Regius Professor decides Leavis is not a ‘fit person for the appointment’ (180). Leavis’s health issues are an

66 Ben Knights, ‘Reading as a Man: Women and the Rise of English Studies in England’, in Miriam Kauko, Sylvia Mieszkowski, Alexandra Tischel, eds., Academia’s Gendered Fringe: A Historical Perspective, 1890-1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2005), pp. 61-82 (p. 75); “paraprofessional”, adj. and n., Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) [accessed 03/02/2019]. 67 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 12, 2. 68 See Montefiore and Varney p. 178. 69 Cambridge, Downing College Archive, More Letters in Criticism by F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis, ed. M. B. Kinch, DCPP/LEA/8/1, ‘The Great Tradition’, Letter to Storm Jameson, November 1948. 66 extreme but articulate example of how the professions might have technically welcomed women by this point, but did little to accommodate their concerns. For many women, academia’s masculine culture translated into significant material difficulties.

The Partnership Principle

On many occasions, scholars describe Q. D. Leavis’s working relationship with her husband as collaborative or as a partnership. Ian MacKillop, for example, calls her a ‘wife and collaborator’.70 William Walsh devotes a chapter to Q. D. called ‘Principle Collaborator’ in a book on F. R. Leavis.71 John Sutherland says in an introduction to a recent edition of her book Fiction and the Reading Public that ‘there is some question as to how much [F. R.] used Q. D. L. as an ‘invisible collaborator’’.72 These assessments acknowledge her input, but they rarely re-evaluate its worth. They do not point out, for example, that if F. R. Leavis worked with his wife, then he was technically a collaborator too. As I have shown, his success relied upon enormous amounts of invisible support, including childcare, chores, emotional management, and editorial assistance. But when F. R. himself cites Q. D. as an influence on his ideas, he usually gives her a somewhat tokenistic mention in his ‘Acknowledgements’. In a comment to the New Statesman in 1957, though, he goes beyond the scholarly convention, saying that his book Culture and Environment (1933) only took him ‘a week’ because ‘the real work had all been done’ by Q. D. Leavis in Fiction and the Reading Public.73 As I discuss further in the next chapter, there is a curious inverse relationship between the value of intellectual work and quantity. Even though F. R. Leavis suggests that Q. D. does all the grunt work, he receives the credit because it is the convention to put one name on the cover of a book. In this section, I will now look at how Q. D. herself defines her marital collaboration. In the 1959 letter to Mary Pitter, Q. D. Leavis uses the phrase the ‘partnership principle’. In a letter to Marie Davis in 1978, she again uses the term ‘partnership’.74 But are partners necessarily equal? In Writing Double: Women’s Literary Partnerships, Bette London explores the ways that women in the nineteenth and early twentieth century used covert and collaborative authorship to get their work published. London says that women writers often resorted to

70 Ian MacKillop, F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism (London: Allen Lane, 1995), p. xv. 71 William Walsh, F. R. Leavis (London: Chatto & Windus, 1980), p. 98. 72 John Sutherland, ‘Introduction’, in Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Pimlico, 2001), p. xxi. 73 F. R. Leavis, Letters in Criticism, ed. by John Tasker (London: Chatto & Windus, 1974), p. 58. 74 Girton College Archive, GCPP Leavis 1/3/5, Letter from Q. D. Leavis to Marie Davis Jan. 21st 1978. 67

‘assert[ing] agency without explicitly claiming authorship’ because publishers and publics often disregarded their work.75 Perhaps, likewise, Q. D. calculated that she would never be as famous as her husband and deliberately focused on supporting his work. It is evident from the three- volumes of her Collected Essays, edited by G. S. Singh and published posthumously in the 1980s, that she did not stop writing, but she stopped trying to build a career. Most of the second and third volumes comprise previously unseen writing on the novel.76 This work was written throughout her lifetime, but she clearly did not consider it a priority to publish. Leavis’s phrase ‘partnership principle’ has a particular history in British politics that also suggests an unequal allegiance. Also referred to as ‘Co-partnership’ or the ‘Co-partnership principle’, it was devised in the nineteenth century to describe a new industrial relation, in which companies paid their employees a fixed percentage of the profits in shares so that employees could become shareholders. While this might sound like a favourable initiative, it was actually a concession designed to placate workers and weaken unions. The partnership principle gave employees a share in their company that was so nominal it did not actually translate into more power over their working conditions or disrupt managerial hierarchies. Leavis will have almost certainly been aware of the phrase as it was used frequently around the turn of the twentieth century. Edith Morley, for example, was probably familiar with the concept through her connection with the Fabian Society, whose founders Beatrice and Sidney Webb published an article in 1913 called ‘What Is Socialism?’ including a subsection titled ‘Co-Partnership between Producer and Consumer’.77 According to Evelyn Chan, Virginia Woolf attended a Fabian conference in the same year that included talks on ‘Co-operation and the ‘‘Self-Governing Workshop’’ and ‘Profit Sharing and Industrial Co-partnership’.78 Leavis demonstrates an astute knowledge of socialist principles in her article ‘Lady Novelists and the Lower Orders’ (1935). Here she claims that although she agrees there is an urgent need to ‘abolish slums, provide better housing, abolish the Means Test, cure unemployment, provide easy access to information about contraception’, socialists could nurture an ‘elementary social consciousness’ more effectively though ‘factual booklets such as Hutt's Condition of the Working Class in Britain’ and ‘simple illustrated articles such as The Listener [the BBC magazine]’ than with thinly veiled propaganda in

75 Bette London, Writing Double: Women’s Literary Partnerships (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 196. 76 See Q. D. Leavis, Collected Essays, ed. by G. S. Singh, 3 Vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983- 1989). 77 Sidney and Beatrice Webb, ‘What Is Socialism? X.—Co-Partnership between Producer and Consumer’, New Statesman, 1.10 (1913), pp. 301-2. 78 Evelyn T. Chan, ‘Professions, Freedom and Form: Reassessing Woolf’s The Years and Three Guineas’, The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 61, No. 251 (2010), 591-613 (p. 595). 68 novels.79 Leavis’s post-doctoral project (which she never finished due to her domestic duties and health issues) intended to look at literary cultures in the Chartist movement through the autobiographies of several ‘men born in the humblest circumstances, in the period 1750-1850’.80 Based on her political understanding and the significant parallels with her marital intellectual dynamic, then, I would argue that Leavis is deliberately using the phrase ‘partnership principle’ to subtly indicate that her partnership is not quite equal. Documents in Leavis’s archive suggest that her primary partnership was in fact with herself. As with Leavis’s other verbal strategies, records of her multi-tasking suggest simultaneous resilience and resistance to her domestic role. Varney says that her mother ‘could do her thinking when she was stirring the jam’ (p. 179); that her intellectual and domestic work was completely intertwined. In Leavis’s archive at Girton there is an unusual hoard among the correspondence, newspaper cuttings, and notes: recipes. Some have been cut out of magazines and newspapers but many of them re-purpose other documents, making them effectively multi-purpose. Leavis wrote recipes on the back and in the margins of everything from students’ work to pages torn out of books, publishers’ contracts, college forms, meeting minutes, and legal correspondence (GCPP Leavis 1/1/2, see Figure 1). Effectively, they radically re-appropriate important institutional, intellectual, and legal texts into mundane memoranda of feminised labour. They do the important work of foregrounding culinary work in particular, which Angela Davis reminds us is the ‘precondition’ (p. 237) to all other kinds of work. By writing around the original texts or overleaf, Leavis brings the professional uncomfortably adjacent with the personal. They demonstrate a distinctly pragmatic approach to her circumstances and a defiant irreverence towards the conventions of bureaucracy and professionalism.

79 Q. D. Leavis, ‘Lady Novelists and the Lower Orders’, Scrutiny, 4 (Sept. 1935), 112-132 (p. 113). 80 Leavis’s post-doctoral proposal, titled ‘The Lives of the Humble: from Self-Elevation to Self-Help’, is held in the English departmental records at Girton. Girton College Archive, GCAC 2/2/9 [envelope inserted in p. 57]. 69

Figure 1: Recipe for Meatballs and Sausage & Red Cabbage Casserole on the Back of Legal Correspondence Reproduced with permission from the Estate of Q. D. Leavis

Pioneer Politics

In this section, I return to Morley’s work to consider her self-narrative in the light of Leavis’s life- writing. Morley and Leavis both hold conflicted attitudes towards women’s rights, often politicise their identity and their achievements, but devalue typically feminine characteristics and tasks. They attempt to deny their womanhood—and their Jewishness, as I will discuss. Building on 70

Goffman and Gilman’s work on the psychological manifestations of oppression, I argue that Morley and Leavis are typical pioneers: a member of an identity group who achieves unprecedented rights or success and therefore becomes exceptional within a defined environment (usually populated by the dominant identity group). Morley outlines her political stance in her memoir, her chapter on women in academia in Women Workers in Seven Professions, and an essay on the book, titled ‘The Economic Position of Women: An Account of some Work attempted by the Fabian Women’s Group’. In the memoir, for example, she says that she sees her dispute with Reading as a victory for the women’s movement: ‘I have always regarded the long struggle about my position and title as my contribution to the battle for fair dealing for women in public and professional life’ (p. 118). Morley also tells us that she actively campaigned outside of the workplace. She undertook a ‘protest against taxation without representation’ and as a result some of her belongings were ‘publicly sold at auction’ (p. 148). She also participated in ‘census-resisting’, spending the night ‘marching up and down the parade with Dr. [Elizabeth] Garrett Anderson’ (p. 149) whilst visiting her in Aldeburgh. Morley put her name to a letter in The Times, because ‘Mrs. Pankhurst wanted publicity for some aspect of the suffrage question’ and thought Morley’s title would get noticed (p. 149). Morley describes these acts as ‘‘Feminist’’, yet puts the label in cautious inverted commas, as well as emphatically asserting that she means ‘not in the sense of being foolish and unnatural opponents of the other sex’ (p. 146). Her views on social reform are surprisingly radical: she says in an article summarising her research on women in the professions that ‘the vote is but a symbol’ and that employment rights are more beneficial to lower-class women.81 She is less enthusiastic about qualities society deems feminine, however. Morley opens her memoir with two disavowals of gender. She says that in childhood she ‘did hate being a girl’ (p. 2) and in the ‘Foreword’ claims that the project is not life-writing, conventionally seen as a feminine literary form: ‘[t]his book is not an autobiography. It is intended to relate my experiences to the background of my period and to portray incidents in the life of a woman, born in the last quarter of the 19th century’ (p. 1). She presents the text instead as a sociological case study (which is one of her methods in Women Workers in Seven Professions) and her use of generic terms such as ‘a woman’ suggests that she sees her experiences as speaking for a whole group’s. Morley sense of herself as a representative echoes her early life, of which she says that she remembers, for example, ‘at college being exhorted to attend carefully to such details of dress, lest [she] made it more difficult for other girls to obtain permission to study’ (p. 62). She

81 See Edith Morley, ‘The Economic Position of Women: An Account of some Work attempted by the Fabian Women’s Group’, The Economic Review, Volume xxiv, No. 4 (October 1914), 389-397 (p. 389). 71 adds that when girls ‘won their way to school and university education’, ‘[t]heir primary business was to prove that their minds were equal to the study of subjects which had hitherto been regarded as beyond their grasp’ (p. 78). In Women Workers in Seven Professions, Morley passes warnings on to other women, telling hopeful academics not to be ‘too conscientious’ about their students or their work, because they will reinforce the idea that women are only good at teaching, thus ‘laying her whole sex open to the charge of being unsuited to university work [i.e. research]’ (pp. 16-7). Goffman argues that this preaching is typical of pioneers, who often feel responsible for ‘enforcing a fair-minded stand and improving the lot of the category as a whole’ (p. 138). Even if they as individuals manage to shed some of the stereotypes of their identity group, they still publicly represent that group. Morley’s language on women’s rights is archetypal pioneer rhetoric, rejecting the idea that her body or her writing might be feminine and reinforcing the idea that women must be exceptional to gain equal status. The pioneer position is, regrettably, a very pragmatic response to living within a community unwilling to accept culture change. As Reading’s archive confirms, Morley is right to encourage members of minority groups to be self-conscious. De Burgh’s private memo states that the university should break their promise to let Morley co-run the department with the second professor, because it would grant her ‘a clear though unofficial preeminence among the woman members of the College staff.’ Like the quotas that universities imposed in the early twentieth century, Reading intend to keep Morley a minority, in case her fighting spirit spreads. Morley herself exploits derogatory tropes about women, too, though. In an undated letter from 1908 to Childs, for example, she says: ‘I hope I have not given the impression that my only feminine characteristic is that of unreasonableness’. As when Leavis comments about feeding ‘the brute’, Morley uses wry humour to suggest she is aware of the stereotype that women are excessively emotional, thus positioning herself as an exception who transcends that norm. Morley also attempts to feign professional rationalism. In a letter dated 29 February 1908, she pleads to Childs: ‘I’m sorry to be such a nuisance when you are doing so much to meet my views: I am not really ungrateful.’82 By pre-empting the management’s criticism, she again tries to indicate that she possesses a self-awareness that most other women do not. As we have seen, though, her strategy was not effective and by 1912 her tone is unapologetic: in a letter to Childs dated 26

82 Literary scholar and teacher trainer Geraldine Hodgson was also haunted by claims that she was suffering from a persecution complex. Historian J. B. Thomas says that it is ‘impossible to say whether Dr Hodgson was the victim of imagined slights or whether she was a genuine victim of academic, and largely male, jealousy and prejudice’, despite himself detailing long-standing issues with ‘a confrontational vice-chancellor’ in a different article. J. B. Thomas, ‘University College, Bristol: Pioneering Teacher Training for Women’, History of Education: Journal of the History of Education Society, 17.1 (1988), 55-70 (p. 67); J. B. Thomas, ‘Mistresses of Method: Women Academics in the Day Training Colleges 1890‐1914’, Journal of Educational Administration and History, 29.2 (1997), 93-107 (p. 102). 72

July, she says that she is unwilling to ‘admit that her ‘“grievances” in the past have been imaginary’. Morley and Leavis both appear to also try to obfuscate their racial identity. According to Morley’s obituary in 1964, she was born into a ‘Jewish, and orthodox’ household.83 The Times states that she ‘formally ceased to profess adherence to Judaism’ at 21, but it is noteworthy that Morley avoids mentioning any personal experience of Jewish religion or culture in her memoir. When she mentions helping Jewish refugees during World War Two, for example, Morley refers to ‘the Jews’ with a distant third person pronoun (pp. 163-4). She only says opaquely that she was qualified to co-ordinate Reading’s refugee programme because she ‘was familiar with the background of the refugees’ (p. 162). Yet Holt describes Morley as a ‘Jewess and a resolute representative of her sex’ (p. 89). The generic gendered racial term is suspect given Morley’s reticence. Academia similarly labelled Q. D. Leavis, another Jewish literary pioneer.84 In 1933, F. L. Lucas, for example, refers to Leavis as ‘Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land Busy’ (p. 286). In contrast to the way Eliot praises ‘hard work’, Lucas sees Leavis’s industriousness as meddling and excessive. Again, after Leavis’s death in 1982, John Carey calls her an ‘archetypal Jewish matriarch’.85 Yet Carey knows she had a very difficult relationship with her identity. As he mentions, when Queenie Roth married gentile F. R. Leavis her family ‘read the burial service for her’ (p. 16). Varney says that she only found out she was Jewish when someone else told her at university (p. 175). So if Leavis successfully suppressed her identity from her own children, how could she be a ‘Jewish matriarch’? Because Carey’s meaning is not literal; he is exploiting the trope that Jewish mothers are formidable to convey that Leavis was, as he phrases it, ‘caustic’ (p. 15). Morley’s and Leavis’s reticence is understandable given the prevalence of anti-Semitism in Europe at the time. Literary academia was also pursuing a dogmatically nationalistic agenda at this time, as I discuss earlier. Their Jewishness may well have compounded their sense of exceptionalism. Gilman explains that Jewishness was historically associated with femininity, quoting Otto Weininger’s 1903 book Sex and Character, for example, which anxiously declares that the turn of the century is “the age which is most Jewish and most feminine” (p. 137). According to Gilman, Weininger and other anti-Semitic writers, ‘extend the category of the feminine to the Jew’ (p. 132), saying, for example, that they often characterise Jewish people as

83 ‘Prof. Edith Morley’, The Times, Tuesday 21 January 1964. 84 Morley’s class status was quite different to Leavis’s: in her memoir, Morley says that she grew up in a house big enough to accommodate 250 people for her ‘coming-out dance’ (p. 14); Kate Varney tells Jan Montefiore that the Roth family ran a ‘draper’s shop’ in Edmonton (p. 175). 85 John Carey, ‘Queenie Leavis—a help or hindrance to her husband?’, The Listener, 7 October 1982, pp. 15-17 (p. 15). 73

‘neurasthenic or hysteric’ (p. 129). As we see when Reading exploits the feminine status of philology, the extra layer of association disguises the deterministic nature of the trope, thus amplifying its power to oppress. Racialising Morley and Leavis is therefore another form of feminisation.

Doubly Feminised

I argue in this chapter that Morley and Leavis share an attitude to femininity and womanhood as a result of both being exceptions in academia. Although their institutional circumstances differ vastly, both suffer due to strictly gendered social and professional expectations. Marriage and a second income cushions Leavis against her own precarity, but also gives her enormous amounts of extra work. While academia feminises Morley’s research and complaints, marriage feminises Leavis’s work outside formal employment. Indeed, Leavis never gains a secure position from which to make complaints or negotiate as Morley does. These women’s presence in universities undoubtedly challenged contemporary stereotypes about women’s lack of intellectual ability, but by presenting themselves as exceptional Morley and Leavis suggest that these stereotypes are nevertheless correct about most women. It is often difficult to point out exactly where and how oppression happens, but Morley’s correspondence gives exceptionally clear examples of how individuals uphold institutional cultures and how their language and decisions has material effects. Similarly, Q. D. Leavis’s life- writing illuminates many aspects of academic life that are usually invisible because they have been deemed feminine. The feminist archival approach I take in this chapter is therefore crucial for identifying women’s work, as well as how histories often overlook it. Morley’s and Leavis’s experiences speak to a debate that has preoccupied feminists for decades: can femininity be waged? The reason Woolf’s statement that marriage is a profession and Federici’s demand for wages for housework both seem provocative is because capitalist society deeply inscribes the notion that care is desirable and therefore not productive work. The significance of the moment when women enter the professions is thus not as a progressive milestone, signalling political equality, but because it demonstrates how allowing feminised subjects do masculine work affects the discourse of gender. This moment exposes the capricious, mercurial, and secretive mechanisms of patriarchal ideology as it adapts to the demands of capitalism. In order to satisfy both ideologies, reading must be work – hard, professional work. As a result, early women 74 scholars are doubly feminised: through biologically essentialist evaluations of their personal traits and through the assumption that they want to do certain kinds of work. But Morley’s and Leavis’s accounts query whether feminised work can ever quite, in fact, be professionalised. If the feminised part of work, such as emotional management and care, are intrinsically intangible and immeasurable, then does a profession actually remunerate this work? Or does it continue to exploit care and desire and only recognise the tangible products of individual work such as publications and qualifications? Leavis provides an incisive critique of professional values in her review of Woolf’s Three Guineas. Here she argues that scholars are the ones missing out, not wives, saying: ‘[o]ne's own kitchen and nursery, and not the drawing-room and dinner-table where tired professional men relax among the ladies (thus Mrs. Woolf), is the realm where living takes place’.86 Her archive likewise defiantly documents the traces, and the absences, of feminised living taking place. In conclusion, then, whereas Eliot sees no alternative to professionalism – only an ellipsis, an absence – for women such as Morley and Leavis, it is professionalism that is a form of extinction.

86 Q. D. Leavis, “Caterpillars of Commonwealth, Unite!”, Scrutiny, 7 (Sept., 1938), 203-214, (p. 211).

Assays of Bias: Women’s Literary Statistics and Sociologies

[John Ruskin] proclaims, in the words of Wordsworth, that “We live by admiration, hope and love,” and that it is for ever unsound and unscientific to ignore these permanent attributes of human nature. The individual cannot separate his work from his human feelings on the one hand, or from his physical capacities and desires on the other. What is true of the individual is true also of society, which is made up of individuals, and cannot, therefore, satisfactorily be regarded as an abstract theoretical entity. Edith Morley, 1916

Partial perspective can be held accountable for both its promising and its destructive monsters. All Western cultural narratives about objectivity are allegories of the ideologies of the relations of what we call mind and body, of distance and responsibility, embedded in the science question in feminism. Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. In this way we might become answerable for what we learn how to see. Donna Haraway, 1991

Objective Criteria

In this chapter, I look at how gender informs the various kinds of statistical literary analysis that appear during academic English studies’ formative years. In the early decades of the twentieth century, literary scholars embark upon many critical experiments, one of the most famous being I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism (1926). In this book Richards documents how he gave his undergraduate students at Cambridge anonymised poems to analyse, in order to test their aesthetic sensibilities. He categorises the students’ errors and outlines his vision for an ideal critical practice, which centres around an ‘objective criteria’ by which ‘poetry can be tested, and the good distinguished from the bad’.1 He similarly argues in a 1924 article on ‘Science and Poetry’ that literary critics need ‘dispassionate analysis’ to correct ‘the wild speculations natural

1 I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment, ed. by John Constable (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 303-4. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 76 in prescientific inquiry’.2 Influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell’s logical positivism and T. S. Eliot’s ‘[i]mpersonal theory of poetry’, Richards introduces a distinctly scientific lexicon into academic literary studies.3 His proposition in Practical Criticism that critics should examine passages isolated from the author’s circumstances and from one’s own ‘emotional reverberations’ (p. 23) went on to inspire generations of readers. His former student, William Empson, for example, goes on to classify Seven Types of Ambiguity in 1930, arguing that the reader should ‘turn the microscope’ on to their literary responses ‘with a certain indifference’.4 Another student, F. R. Leavis, claims in 1933 that budding critics should ‘collect their own examples and make their own analyses and classifications [of rhetorical language in advertisements]’.5 But while these scholars are trying to formulate ‘objective criteria’ and undertake ‘dispassionate analysis’, other scholars are using scientific diction and statistical analysis for more idiosyncratic, passionate aims. In this chapter, I explore a statistical tradition trying to unearth socio-political contexts and authorial experience, by women. Caroline Spurgeon, Q. D. Leavis, and Edith Morley all use statistical analysis to assess literary objects of study—or, rather, persons involved in literary activities. In a chapter on women in academia for the collection Women Workers in Seven Professions (1913), Morley collates data on literary scholars’ working conditions and provides an autoethnographic account of academic life. In Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), Leavis uses questionnaires to ask writers of popular fiction about general reading habits and categorises their responses by literary brow. In Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935), Spurgeon classifies poetic images from the playwright’s entire oeuvre, concluding that frequent metaphors indicate his personality and proclivities. In each case, their data is textual, but their object of study is human. Morley investigates women professionals, Leavis surveys writers of bestselling novels, Spurgeon explores Shakespeare’s mind. These three women categorise texts for vastly different purposes from Richards et al.. Rather than testing for aesthetic qualities in either the text or the reader, they use them to diagnose psychological and socio-political phenomena.

2 I. A. Richards, ‘Science and Poetry’, Atlantic Monthly, 136 (Oct. 1925), 481-491 (p. 483). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 3 Richards’s fellow undergraduate and poet Kathleen Raine describes finding Cambridge’s critical methods ‘compatible with Wittgenstein’s and Russell’s new logical positivism’, the ‘materialist science of the Cavendish laboratory’, and ‘the new values of science—the quantitative and the rational’. Kathleen Raine, ‘The Land Unknown’ (1973), in Autobiographies (London: Skoob Books, 1991), p. 130; T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), pp. 39-49 (p. 44). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 4 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd edn (London: Pimlico, 2004), p. 313. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 5 F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (London: Chatto & Windus, 1933), pp. 12-13. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text abbreviated as CE. 77

As with the other aspects of literary criticism I explore in this project, in this chapter, I argue that the distinction between these two kinds of statistical analysis derives from a gendered conception of the ideal literary mind. In statistical criticism, this distinction manifests as several critical modalities: where the critics locate bias, how they seek to mitigate it, to what extent they attribute aesthetic choices to socio-historical circumstances, and whether they tend towards specific or universal claims. In this chapter, I consider these modalities in turn. The first section focuses on Shakespeare's Imagery, looking at how both Spurgeon herself and reviewers of the book perceive her as a computational instrument, comprehensive but unimaginative. I also look at how she takes Richards’s proposition in ‘Science and Poetry’ that reading poetry creates ‘image- bodies’ in the mind and makes quite literal conclusions about Shakespeare’s physiology and psychology. The second half of the chapter looks at the role of emotion in collecting data from human subjects in Morley’s work and how Leavis uses the label ‘anthropological’ to indicate a distance between herself and her object of study. I group Morley’s and Leavis’s work together, firstly, because they look at groups of people, whereas Spurgeon looks at one individual and, secondly, because Spurgeon classifies textual features (to analyse psychological traits), while Morley and Leavis categorise social phenomena (deducted from textual data). Underscoring both the Cambridge-based critics’ and women pioneers’ practices is a somewhat eclectic use of scientific principles and terms. Richards’s first words to the first cohort on the ‘Practical Criticism’ course were ‘[t]his course is an experiment’; F. R. Leavis claims that Culture and Environment is ‘experimental’ and ‘incites to experiment’ (p. 8); Spurgeon’s working title for her project is ‘assays of bias’ (p. 3).6 It was not difficult to be innovative in a nascent discipline, though, so why would literary scholars adopt such scientific diction? I believe that the reasons differ for each group and are informed by gendered conceptions of knowledge- production. For the Cambridge-based critics, the ideal critic mind reflects a particular version of objectivity. Their methods differ, but their leanings towards ‘dispassionate analysis’, ‘objective criteria’ and ‘indifference’ suggest they believe that the experimenter should suppress their emotions and personal associations. We can trace this notion to the rise of science in British universities during the nineteenth century. As Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison explain, objectivity is

6 Cambridge, Magdalene College Old Library, The Richards Collection, Box 17: Tripos Papers and Practical Criticism Protocols, Notebook 21: ‘Practical Criticism Oct. 20 1925’, ‘Lecture I The Conditions of the Experiment’, p. 1. This introduction is crossed through and the first sentence rewritten, along with the date ‘Oct. 1927’, on the verso. Further references to this collection are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 78

not the same as truth or certainty, and it is younger than both. Objectivity preserves the artifact or variation that would have been erased in the name of truth; it scruples to filter out the noise that undermines certainty. To be objective is to aspire to knowledge that bears no trace of the knower — knowledge unmarked by prejudice or skill, fantasy or judgment, wishing or striving.7

In other words, objectivity is a historically specific formulation of impartiality that asks individual researchers to suppress their eccentricities and feelings in order to experience an object unmediated. Indeed, Daston and Galiston’s list of intellectual traits to avoid would not look out of place among Richards’s categories of students’ errors in Practical Criticism; ‘prejudice’ and ‘fantasy’ are very similar to his labels ‘stock responses’ and ‘erratic associations’ (p. 23), for example. For the Cambridge-based critics, good criticism is about the critic’s psyche, not their methods. Like Eliot’s ideal poet, who is not interesting because of ‘his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life’ (p. 48), they judge the critic on their ability to embody a certain emotional state, or, in this case, unemotional state. In Practical Criticism, Richards does in fact acknowledge that the ‘personal situation of the reader inevitably (and within limits rightly) affects his reading’, but argues that ‘recollected feelings may overwhelm and distort the poem’, which exists to ‘control and order such feelings’ (pp. 236-7). In ‘Science and Poetry’, he argues that the reader should read a poem ‘experimentally, repeating it, varying our tone of voice until we are satisfied we have caught its rhythm’ (p. 484). In other words, Richards believes that one must use checks and measures to ensure one’s impressions are consistent. Empson also argues that emotion must be controlled, saying that readers must ‘have the power first of reacting to a poem sensitively and definitely (one may call that feminine)’ and then ‘prevent their new feelings of the same sort from interfering with the process of understanding the original ones (one may call that masculine)’ (p. 313). While it might seem as though Empson wants to blend the two gendered processes, his recipe for neutrality is not a balanced androgyny. In his procedure, masculinity essentially neutralises femininity, diluting it to the point of inoculation. For both critics, emotion is unreliable raw data whose crude waywardness must be tempered by thought. In contrast, Spurgeon sees literature as the unfettered expression of emotion, saying, for example, that Shakespeare’s imagery ‘unwittingly lays bare his own innermost likes and dislikes, observations and interests, associations of thought, attitudes of mind and beliefs’ (p. 4). Morley similarly sees emotion as integral to the analytical process in its early stages. In Women Workers in Seven Professions, she explains that when

7 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007), p. 17. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 79 interviewing women, one has to be friendly and encouraging or one would collect no data at all: ‘[t]he first step was to get women to speak out, to analyse their own difficulties and hindrances’.8 Unlike Richards, Morley and Spurgeon actively seek out highly personal, particular life experiences. Even when Richards is interested in human subjects, such as, in Practical Criticism, when he classifies the psychological symptoms of bad reading, he creates abstract universals, such as ‘[s]entimentality’ and ‘[i]nhibition’ (p. 24, emphasis in the original). In 1934, Richards’s fellow Cambridge scholar, F. L. Lucas, warns against making such claims. Quoting T. S. Eliot, he argues that what people in fact mean when they say that ‘Art demands a bleak and uncompromising daylight’, or ‘impersonality’, is that they themselves demand these things; being, or wishing to be, or wishing to appear to be, severe intellectuals with none of your sentimental nonsense about them.9

Lucas suggests that critics are tempted to formulate statements that grammatically resemble universal facts – such as ‘Art demands’, rather than ‘I demand’ – because a ‘new generalisation, whether true or not, gives them a sense of mastery over the Universe’ (p. 307). Daston and Galison see the same desire in scientific enquiry, noting that Francis Bacon wrote in the seventeenth century that men should ‘bend nature as a wand to a contrary extreme, whereby to set it right’ (p. 32). Daston and Galison propose that, like practical criticism, ‘[t]he mastery of scientific practices is inevitably linked to self-mastery, the assiduous cultivation of a certain kind of self’ (p. 40). We see this in Eliot’s statement in ‘The Perfect Critic’, where he claims that the ‘sentimental person, in whom a work of art arouses all sorts of emotions which have nothing to do with that work of art whatever, but are accidents of personal association, is an incomplete artist’.10 For Eliot, the artist who cannot control their thoughts and feelings, the artist to whom they appear as if by accident, is not really an artist. But, as I explore in chapter one, academia often characterises women as incapable of regulating their emotions in this period. So how did early women scholars engage with statistical and scientific modes of enquiry? Morley, Spurgeon, and Leavis tend to employ statistical methods to assess localised, human phenomena. They look at either individuals, such as Shakespeare, or socio-political

8 Edith Morley, ed., Women Workers in Seven Professions: A Survey of Their Economic Conditions and Prospects (London: Routledge, 1914), p. xi. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 9 F. L. Lucas, Studies in French and English (London: Cassell & Co., 1934), p. 307. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 10 Originally published in the Athenaeum in two parts on 9 and 23 July 1920, then collected later that year in The Sacred Wood. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Perfect Critic’, in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), pp.1-13 (p. 6). 80 groupings, such as middle-brow writers or women professionals. Q. D. Leavis shares Richards’s concern for current literary taste, but situates her data within a discussion of the socio-economic factors affecting the literary market, such as commercial publishing. By categorising her respondents according to their ability to discern how taste relates to social hierarchies, Leavis continually intertwines aesthetic analysis with political commentary. In a 1965 essay, ‘A Glance Backward’, she says that it had begun to seem ‘wasteful and dangerous to discuss a novel in an aesthetic vacuum, as if novels were written in a timeless contemporary void’.11 Likewise, Spurgeon looks at literary elements, but with very little attention to their aesthetic merit. Indeed, she bases her argument on the idea that Shakespeare’s work is good because his subjectivity is uniquely sensitive, rather than universally relevant. Edith Morley’s work deviates the furthest from the discursive study of literary texts, by surveying women scholars’ working conditions. While Morley did not intend Women Workers in Seven Professions to be a work of literary criticism, I discuss it alongside Leavis’s work in this chapter as a way of querying whether her subject-matter – the material conditions literary scholars write within – is in fact a suitable object of study for literary academia. Like Spurgeon and Leavis, Morley studies the aspect of literary criticism that close reading invites us to ignore: writers’ personal and socio-political circumstances. I also include Morley’s work in this chapter to highlight that all three of my protagonists use statistical methods. I believe that their motivations for doing so derive from the same gendered tendencies we see elsewhere in their work: their sense of political urgency and their somewhat modest self-perception. At the time, Morley’s research was by far the most imperative, because, as she explains, ‘a new force is at work’; middle- and upper-class women are beginning to ‘demand for freedom to work’ (p. xi). While these women had been training to become lawyers and doctors since the late nineteenth century, many places still stubbornly resisted employing them, let alone for equal pay. It took several decades of the kinds of activism Morley describes in her memoir, such as census-resisting, before the government legislated against professional discrimination, with the 1919 The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act. As Morley explains, then, when she is writing in 1913, the ‘economic position of women bristles with anomalies’ (p. xi). Leavis also sees herself as responding to a crisis, though. In Fiction and the Reading Public, she argues that a new ‘kind of interest in fiction’ is ‘of great urgency’ (p. xiii) now that rates of literacy are rising and books are cheap. Spurgeon’s motivation, on the other hand, appears to be a desire to assist other scholars. By doing the drudgery, she hopes that her index ‘leads others—better equipped—to study fresh aspects and garner further results’ (p. xi). Morley

11 Q. D. Leavis, ‘A Glance Backwards, 1965’, in Collected Essays, Volume 1, ed. by G. S. Singh (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 14. 81 says, too, that she was ‘conscious that many people were better suited to the editorial task’ before her (p. v). Effectively, while these women use statistical methods to make their analysis impersonal too, they envisage a different kind of impersonality to male contemporaries such as Richards. Donna Haraway’s theory of situated knowledges is a helpful pointer for thinking about how statistical analysis might mitigate hermeneutic mastery. In the theory, Haraway suggests that the ‘standpoints of the subjugated are not “innocent”’, but might be ‘preferred because in principle they are least likely to allow denial of the critical and interpretative core of all knowledge’. 12 Similarly, I want to argue that these three early women scholars are better able to judge their critical distance because their gendered status means that their own position is ever present to them as a position, not a neutral pedestal. Haraway offers a useful rejoinder to the idea that objectivity is ‘seeing everything from nowhere’, or, ‘the god trick’ (p. 189), by saying that a feminist objectivity hinges on one’s ‘particular and specific embodiment’, from which one can only ever claim ‘partial perspective’ (p. 190). This is what I believe Morley, Spurgeon, and Leavis do. By presenting themselves as lowly technicians or by using a political cause to justify why they personally should carry out the research, they effectively disappear themselves from the analytical process as contemporary discourse imagines it; they diminish their agency over the knowledge they produce, but acknowledge their place in the process of its production. Rather than trying to suppress the individuality of either themselves as researchers or their participants, they pursue partiality, because they see it as a source of new knowledge. All three women’s scholarship bears fruitful comparison with recent examples of sociological and statistical literary criticism. Franco Moretti’s theories of ‘distant reading’, for example, in which he argues one can only ‘understand the system in its entirety’ by learning ‘how not to read’ (emphasis in the original), resonates with Spurgeon’s attempt to take on Shakespeare’s entire metaphorical oeuvre.13 Leavis’s anxieties about literary quantity find a parallel in Moretti’s attempts to analyse ‘Seven Thousand Titles’ of British novels.14 Similarly, Heather Love’s work on ‘thick description’ are useful for theorising Edith Morley’s methods of data collection.15 In the first section of this chapter, I look at the similarities between Moretti’s

12 Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and The Privilege of Partial Perspective’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Partial Perspective (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 191. 13 Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review, 1 (Jan-Feb 2000), 54-68 (p. 57). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 14 See Franco Moretti, ‘Style, Inc.: Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles (British Novels, 1740–1850)’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Autumn 2009), 134-158. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 15 Love discusses descriptive analytical methods in two articles, titled ‘Close Reading and Thin Description’ and ‘Close But Not Deep’. Heather Love, ‘Close Reading and Thin Description’, Public Culture 25:3 (2013), 401-434 82 theory of ‘distant reading’ and Spurgeon’s self-titled ‘indirect reading’ (p. 3). Later, I look at Morley’s self-reflections alongside Love’s work on autoethnography, as well as returning to Arlie Russell Hochschild’s work on emotion management. Finally, I discuss Leavis’s influence on British Cultural Studies figures such as Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and Richard Hoggart, discussing what she might mean by the term ‘anthropological’. These comparisons prompt us to reassess our definitions of literary sociologies in various ways. Coming long before the digital age, they are nevertheless forms of computational analysis. By choosing to describe these three women’s methods as ‘statistical’, I follow Yohei Igarashi. Igarashi prefers this term over ‘“quantitative”’, which has existing connotations concerning the study of prosody and, to my mind, suggests purely numerical data.16 He argues that the phrase “statistical analysis”, instead, ‘accommodates the full range of objects that historically have been amassed and analyzed, including phonemes, letters, and words’ (p. 487). Morley, Spurgeon, and Leavis add another object of study to this list: literary persons. Their work asks a basic question: is a text the only acceptable object of study for literary academia? Furthermore, whereas literary scholarship usually concerns itself with the closeness or distance between the text and a hypothetical person, the reader, their work imagines proximity differently, between two very real, if absent, persons. For Spurgeon, the persons in her analysis are herself and Shakespeare. For Morley and Leavis, they are themselves and their participants. For all three women, the text is a portal to another person’s mind and can therefore transform into statistics or social phenomena, and back again, without losing its imaginative power.

A Personal Count

While ‘Recollecting Jane Austen’ in 1975, A. Walton Litz describes Caroline Spurgeon’s data analysis as painfully passé:

(pp. 408, 409). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text abbreviated as CRTD. Heather Love, ‘Close But Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn’, New Literary History, 41 (2010), 371-391. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text abbreviated as CBND. 16 Yohei Igarashi, ‘Statistical Analysis at the Birth of Close Reading’, New Literary History, Volume 46, Number 3 (Summer 2015), 485-504 (p. 487). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 83

Karl Kroeber's […] many computer-based tables of word frequency, sentence structure, and repeated imagery are as up-to-date as Caroline Spurgeon, and provide Kroeber (as he frankly confesses) with more embarrassment than help.17

Litz is referring to Spurgeon’s extraordinary book, Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells Us (1936), the result of her attempt to thematically categorise every instance of imagery in every one of Shakespeare’s plays. Spurgeon spent ten years on the project and says in the book that during that time she read every play ‘three times’.18 Spurgeon’s aim was twofold: to create an index of Shakespeare’s imagery for future references and to analyse it for clues about ‘Shakespeare’s personality, temperament and thought’ and ‘the themes and characters of the plays’ (p. ix). Unlike Kroeber’s project, Spurgeon’s is not computer-based, but it is, as she says, ‘computation’ (p. 43). Spurgeon’s method comprised of the extremely repetitive tasks of typing out quotations onto index cards, categorising them by theme, and drawing up tallies and tables by hand. She cross-referenced the images thematically, chronologically, and by play, then did the same with other playwrights for comparison, including Marlowe, Chapman, and Jonson. From the data, Spurgeon concludes, among other things, that Shakespeare had an acute ‘sensitiveness’ (p. 69) to sensory information, was ‘a compactly well-built man’, and was particularly ‘observant of everyday concrete things and events, especially in outdoor country life and the homely indoor routine’ (p. 29). In this section, I look at how Spurgeon and her contemporaries gender the two salient features of her project: repetitive statistical data collection and biographically diagnostic analysis. Ben Knights argues that English studies has historically held ‘a suspicion of the taxonomic imagination’ and that scholars have seen ‘diagrams and schemes […] as an index of a reductive, mechanistic view of the world’.19 Numerical and pictorial analysis is not especially common in literary criticism. Indeed, many of Spurgeon’s reviewers believed that statistics were inappropriate tools for literature. R. G. Cox, for example, sees her method as mercantile, saying that her ‘illustrative charts and diagrams […] look like the statistical reports of the Empire Marketing Board’ (see Fig. 2).20 The Oxford Magazine says that her tables are too prosaic; that ‘the instruments she has so elaborately fashioned are at times a little humourlessly applied to the fine

17 A. Walton Litz, ‘Recollecting Jane Austen’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Mar., 1975), 669-682 (pp. 680-681). 18 Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 43. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 19 Ben Knights, Pedagogic Criticism: Reconfiguring University English Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 53. 20 R. G. Cox, ‘Statistical Criticism’, Scrutiny (Dec. 1935), 309-310 (p. 309). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 84 stuff they dissect and measure’.21 But some of the most famous early-twentieth-century critical experiments are taxonomical projects. I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism and William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, for example, both categorise their subject matter. Yet in Richards’s follow-up study, Interpretation in Teaching, he finds that

too often—as in many of the classifications of Shakespeare’s ‘imagery’ that have recently come into vogue—that the metaphors are being sorted in respect to one only of the pair of ‘ideas’ which every metaphor, at its simplest, gives us.22

Although ‘classifications’ are clearly proliferating at this time, the doubting quotation marks suggest that it is Spurgeon’s investigation that Richards finds particularly grating. But how does Spurgeon’s work differ from Richards’s or Empson’s? Why do scholars see Shakespeare's Imagery as a fad and Practical Criticism as a seminal piece of criticism? Spurgeon’s archive at the Folger Shakespeare Library shows that she was directly influenced by Richards. A notebook containing research from the early stages of the project includes notes on when she first read each play, quotations about the purposes of literary criticism, and notes on ‘Science and Poetry’. However, many of Spurgeon’s practices contrast sharply with Richards’s. In this section, I look at two key differences: how Spurgeon imagines herself as a kind of assistive machine or technician, and how she uses images for biographical diagnoses. The first difference is demonstrated by the sheer amount of work Spurgeon’s archive contains. The archive holds 48 boxes of index cards (see Fig. 3), reams of analytical notes, along with multiple handwritten and typed drafts of the book. It also holds a professionally printed pamphlet listing Spurgeon’s categories of images against the number for the corresponding index card box—an index of indexes, if you will. While it is not unusual for scholars to conduct vast amounts of research, Spurgeon’s method is particularly repetitive. The notes show that she handwrote each quotation onto an index card (see Fig. 4) and then again on larger sheets of paper, which she organised by theme and sub-theme (see Fig. 5). She made lists of themes and sub- themes and tallied up how many times each theme occurred in each play (see Fig. 6). Because, as Richards points out, many of the images have multiple layers of meaning, she also cross- referenced each image and theme. She duplicated many of her tallies, tables, and conclusions by typing them up, then embarked upon various drafts of the book. Sonya Rudikoff comments in 1979 that ‘[c]omputer analysis is a technique which Caroline Spurgeon could have used in her

21 ‘Review’, Oxford Magazine, May 21st 1936, p. 602. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 22 I. A. Richards, Interpretation in Teaching, ed. by John Constable (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 120. 85 study’ if it had been conducted later.23 But her extraordinarily long-winded, meticulous notetaking suggests that, even if she could, she may not have wanted to; that she enjoyed this kind of work. Indeed, Spurgeon’s aptitude for counting and categorising is not only present in Shakespeare’s Imagery. Her first publication, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion (1357-1900), is a three-volume compendium of Chaucerian scholarship. Published in French in 1911 and in English in 1925, it features, as the subtitle announces, ‘twenty-four collotype illustrations, introduction, notes, appendices and general index’.24 Spurgeon’s archive at Royal Holloway in London shows she also made her own personal index of Times Literary Supplement articles on Shakespeare. Covering several decades, it includes alphabetical entries of article dates, titles, and authors, subcategorised by play, theme, and character.25 While scholarly work usually involves some drudgery, for Spurgeon the drudgery often becomes the finished article. In Shakespeare’s Imagery, she includes her charts and tables in appendices and preserves the index cards in the hope that her work ‘leads others—better equipped—to study fresh aspects [of Shakespeare’s work] and garner further results’ (p. xi). Whereas, for example, Edith Morley also compiles an index of Henry Crabb Robinson’s letters whilst researching his circle of correspondents for her own benefit, Spurgeon’s index is the research.26 There is further evidence that Spurgeon enjoys repetitive tasks. In her early notebooks for the Shakespeare’s Imagery project, she copies out lengthy quotations on the aims and ideal methods of literary criticism. The result is a vast literature review, including remarks by James Joyce, John Keats, John Middleton Murray, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vernon Lee, Henry James, Theodora Bosanquet, Virginia Woolf, E. K. Chambers, George Saintsbury, and Edith Sitwell (S.d.75). Once again, Spurgeon’s tendency is to cast widely around and put in extensive amounts of work. At the end of her notes on ‘Science and Poetry’, too, she writes: ‘[t]he whole article needs to be reread carefully’.27 Spurgeon in fact spends the majority of her

23 Sonya Rudikoff, ‘How Many Lovers Had Virginia Woolf?’ The Hudson Review, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter, 1979-1980), 540-566 (p. 541). 24 Caroline Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion (1357-1900) (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1925). 25 Royal Holloway, University of London, Papers of Professor Caroline Spurgeon PP7/4/4/2, ‘Index to Shakespeare in the T. L. S.’. 26 Morley produced various collections of Crabb Robinson’s letters, for example, Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers (1938), The Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson with the Wordsworth Circle, 1808-1866 (1927), Crabb Robinson in Germany, 1800-1805 (1929). University of Reading, Special Collections, Edith Morley Collection, MS 938/7/5, Index to Henry Crabb Robinson's diary of letters [undated]; MS 938/7/6 Catalogue of some of Henry Crabb Robinson's letters with a few transcripts [undated]. 27 The brown leather-bound notebook is one of three held in the Folger Shakespeare Library, which contain what look like Spurgeon’s initial attempts at recording and analysing Shakespeare’s imagery. Folger Shakespeare Library, Personal Papers of Caroline Spurgeon, MS Add.347, S.d.79. 86 relatively short working life doing computational research. As she explains in Shakespeare's Imagery, she intends to make use of her database in two further projects: the second tackling ‘questions of authorship considered in the light of this freshly collected evidence’ and the third ‘the background of Shakespeare's mind and the origins of his imagery’ (p. ix). They were never completed, however, because Spurgeon’s health declined. She was sixty-six when Shakespeare's Imagery was published and she died only six years later.28 Therefore, two of her three major publications are indexes.29 It is useful to draw parallels between descriptions of Spurgeon’s working methods and academia’s attitudes towards teaching and editing, which I explore in chapter one. In the same way that Reading University ambivalently appreciates Edith Morley’s teaching and Q. D. Leavis feels conflicted about her ability to assist her husband, both Spurgeon and her contemporaries simultaneously commend industriousness, whilst understating its ability to garner profound intellectual insights. In the ‘Preface’ to Shakespeare’s Imagery Spurgeon downplays her intellectual work, saying that her ‘excuse’ for attempting the project is that ‘no one has attempted seriously or systematically to assemble or examine [the imagery] at all’ (p. xi). The first words of the ‘Preface’ are that ‘[t]he following study is an attempt’ (p. ix) and she goes on to modestly state that her ‘boldness will have been justified’ if it ‘leads others—better equipped—to study fresh aspects and garner further results’ (p. xi). Despite conceiving of the project and working on it alone for a decade, Spurgeon does not seem to consider herself qualified to make critical assessments. She also describes her work as if it happened automatically. When explaining her method in the introduction, Spurgeon uses the passive voice to explain how Shakespeare’s images ‘are assembled, sorted, and examined on a systematic basis’ (p. x). Effectively removing herself from the process, she consistently positions herself as a technician, machine, or assistant. As Daston and Galison explain, in this respect, Spurgeon was in fact following scientific trends. They explore how, in the mid-nineteenth century, the scientific community begins to replace the figure of the meddler-with-nature, such as the famous Dr Frankenstein, with the idea of ‘mechanical objectivity’, or, ‘a set of procedures that would, as it were, move nature to the page through a strict protocol’ (p. 121). As Natalia Cecire argues, though, the ability of mechanical work to produce authoritative knowledge is contingent on socio-political factors,

28 Spurgeon explains in an autobiographical essay published in German as ‘Mein Arbeitsweg’ that her education and career were significantly delayed because of her gender. She had to go to Paris, for example, to study a doctorate because very few places in the U.K. would enrol women at that time. Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, ‘Mein Arbeitsweg’, in Elga Kerns, ed., Fuhrendë Frauen Europas, 2nd edn (Munchen:̈ Ernst Reinhardt, 1999), pp. 88-92. The typescript of Spurgeon’s English version, ‘My Career’, is held in the Folger (S.d. 75). 29 The third is a commentary on Keats’s copy of Shakespeare’s plays. Caroline Spurgeon, Keats’s Shakespeare: A Descriptive Study Based on New Material (London: Humphrey Milford for Oxford University Press, 1928). 87 including gender. Discussing the poetry of Gertrude Stein, Cecire states that ‘performing objectivity risks rendering oneself an object—a dangerous maneuver for a class already prone to objectification’.30 Thus, in experimental conditions, Cecire explains that ‘[t]he woman scientist as such disappears, leaving only an apparatus—a protocol, the guarantee of objectivity’ (p. 81). Others do not perceive the woman scientist, or, in Spurgeon’s case, statistical analyst, as achieving objectivity because she had no potent subjectivity to suppress in the first case. While some researchers’ statistics appear rigorous, others appear reliant on external checks and measures. The reception of Shakespeare’s Imagery in the scholarly community demonstrates this double standard well, unfortunately. Spurgeon appears happy to disembody herself from the analytical process, but reviewers also tended to do likewise. S. Gorey Putt, for example, praises the book’s ‘usefulness’ and R. P. Blackmur says the book will be of ‘great practical use’ for other scholars.31 The Oxford Magazine says Spurgeon is ‘nothing if not thorough’ (p. 602). Virginia Gildersleeve, Spurgeon’s ‘intimate friend’, says in her autobiography that ‘she had a good capacity for hard work, even drudgery’ and that her ‘passion for thoroughness led her on and on’.32 In these portraits Spurgeon appears like an automaton, reading tirelessly but also somewhat aimlessly. Cleanth Brooks later claims that Spurgeon ‘has hardly explored the full implications of her discovery’ and ‘realized only a part of the potentialities’, missing that Spurgeon herself highlights that her research could be the beginnings of many more projects.33 But Stanley Hyman points out what other reviews miss. As Hyman explains, Shakespeare’s Imagery proved that there is linguistic – and therefore authorial – consistency between the plays, meaning that scholars could ‘polish off Bacon as a Shakespeare contender’ (p.97). Spurgeon’s comprehensiveness, which many see as directionless, is crucial for finding such patterns. Only by stepping back from the monologues, plots, and themes to see the whole corpus can she produce quantitative evidence. Even if most reviewers praise Spurgeon’s diligence in principle, they fail to appreciate its value in practice.

30 Natalia Aki Cecire, ‘A Sense of the Real: Experimental Writing and the Sciences, 1879-1946’ (University of California, Berkeley, 2013), p. 81. Further references to this thesis are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 31 S. Gorey Putt, ‘Imagination All Compact’, The Saturday Review, November 23 1935, p. 6; R. P. Blackmur, ‘Assays of Bias’, New Republic, 19 February 1936, p. 32. 32 Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve, Many a Good Crusade (New York: Macmillan, 1954), pp. 230-231. See chapter three for a discussion of the term ‘intimate friend’. 33 Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (1947), quoted in Stanley Edgar Hyman, ‘The Critical Achievement of Caroline Spurgeon’, The Kenyon Review, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Winter, 1948), 92-108, p. 108. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 88

Figure 2: Chart Showing Frequency of Various Themes, Shakespeare’s Imagery p. 417 89

Figure 3: Index Card Box for Edward III Photograph by Natalie Wright, from the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library

Figure 4: Index Card Showing an Image Categorised under ‘Books’ from Richard III Photograph by Natalie Wright, from the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library 90

Figure 5: Handwritten Sub-Categories of Death Imagery Photograph by Natalie Wright, from the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library

91

Figure 6: Handwritten Table Counting Images in Five Plays Photograph by Natalie Wright, from the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library

Spurgeon’s modest mechanicality is fundamental to her ideas about how bias operates. An annotated draft of the introduction shows that she revised the language in this section at some point prior to publication, changing ‘make bold’ to ‘venture’ and ‘believe’ to ‘suggest’ (S.d. 75, pp. 3-4). She also takes extensive pains in the published book to qualify her claims in an appendix, where she outlines some of the ‘Difficulties Connected with the counting and classifying of images’. Here she states that ‘[p]robably no two people would entirely agree as to the number of 92 images to be found in any one play’ (p. 359) and that some of her classifications are ‘arbitrarily chosen’ (p. 360). Spurgeon goes on to say:

I can only explain as clearly as possible the method I have followed, with the reminder that the counting of images is an elusive and intangible task, differing entirely from the counting of concrete objects, and submit for what they may be worth the following figures as the result of my own personal count. It must be remembered that any count of this kind, however, carefully done, must to some extent be an approximate one, dependent on the literary judgment and methods of the person who has compiled it. The safeguard of this particular count is that it has all been done by the same person and on the same method (p. 360).

By apologetically admitting her limitations, Spurgeon suggests that the researcher’s honesty about their biases makes data reliable. She sees herself as one piece in a larger project; detailing her flaws will mean that other scholars can improve upon them in the future. Here, again, she envisions herself as mechanical and assistive. The researcher in her model, who implements methods rather than directing analysis, thus also cannot be held responsible for what Daston and Galiston describe as ‘epistemic virtues’ (p. 40), such as objectivity; they can only perform tasks that try to mitigate their lack of neutrality. Richards, however, approaches bias completely differently. In Practical Criticism, he explains that the experiment involved ‘issuing printed sheets of poems’ to undergraduates who ‘were asked to comment freely in writing on them’ (p. 13). In order to try and avoid students making assumptions based on literary reputations or prior knowledge, the ‘authorship of the poems was not revealed’ (p. 13). Richards believes that using the classic scientific method of double anonymity encouraged uninhibited responses, saying that ‘only through anonymity could complete liberty to express their genuine opinions be secured for the writers’ (p. 13). But this is disingenuous. As Gerald Graff explains:

If you deprive readers of the information needed to infer the probable relevant circumstances of a text, you force them to do the next best thing and construct an improbable set of circumstances, which is what Richards's hapless protocol writers persistently did. Deprived of the information needed to make an appropriate response, they quite naturally grasped for—what else?—a “stock” one.34

Richards takes the students’ bad interpretations as proof that they could not evaluate poetry for themselves, but is that not what they had come to university to learn? He effectively tests them on

34 Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 175. 93 the abilities he should be teaching. He also takes pleasure in their ineptitude, writing to his future wife Dorothy Pilley in 1923 that he is ‘nearly ill with laughter’ (p. ix) at the opinions of the entrants for that year’s essay prize. Thus, when Richards says that one of his aims for the project is ‘to introduce a new kind of documentation to those who are interested in the contemporary state of culture’ (p. 13, my emphasis), he somewhat glosses over the invasive process by which he gathered the documents. When Richards tells the first group of students that the ‘Practical Criticism’ course is ‘an experiment’, he doesn’t quite explain that they are its subjects. Richards is also disingenuous about his influence over the experimental process. His aim in the ‘Practical Criticism’ course is to collect data about bias in an unbiased way. In the book he categorises all the ‘difficulties of criticism’ his students encountered: ‘making out the plain sense of poetry’, problems with ‘sensuous apprehension’ and ‘imagery’, ‘mnemonic irrelevances’ such as ‘erratic associations’ and ‘the interference of emotional reverberations’, ‘stock responses’, ‘[s]entimentality’, ‘[i]nhibition’, ‘[h]ardness of Heart’, ‘[d]octrinal adhesions’, ‘technical presuppositions’ and ‘general critical preconceptions’ (pp. 21-25). Apart from hermeneutic issues, he finds that the main problems are excessive or inadequate sensibility, preconceptions, and personal associations. Richards censors some of these from the start, however. He says in the book that ‘the full extent of [his] interference’ was to ‘hint that the poems were perhaps a mixed lot’ (p. 4), but his lecture notebooks at Magdalene College archive show that this is not true. In the first lecture, he also tells students: ‘[r]efrain as hard as you can from writing more literature about the literature I put before you’ (p. 4v, emphasis in the original).35 Annotations show that at some point later, he adds that he wishes to ‘ban certain words and phrases. For instance Beauty.’ He is therefore already priming the students to provide certain kinds of criticism. When he tries to suppress his experimental subjects’ flowery language, personal references, and excessive emotion, he essentially conflates his definition of critical bias with a broader notion of experimental interference. He tries to use experimental conditions to make an objective claim that students need to be taught how to be objective. But by trying to eradicate his subjects’ bias in order to achieve reputable results, Richards has to impose his own definition of critical objectivity upon his subjects. His experiment is therefore actually highly subjective. Thus, his claim that cultural conventions and inappropriate emotions must be absent to achieve critical objectivity does not come from his data, but from his own presumptions.

35 These annotations are undated. Elsewhere in this notebook there are revisions dated 1927, but Richards gave this lecture for at least 10 years. They do show, however, that Richards tries to further influence his students in later years. 94

Images and Bodies

Spurgeon’s attempt to collate thousands and thousands of phrases is aptly described by Franco Moretti’s recent formulation, ‘distant reading’. In his ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, Moretti defines distant reading as ‘synthesis’, as opposed to ‘analysis’, and involves ‘second hand reading’, or, learning ‘how not to read’ (p. 57). Spurgeon similarly describes her method as ‘indirect reading’, after Polonius in Hamlet, who says that one can ‘with assays of bias, | By indirections find directions out’ (p. 3). Unlike a close reader looking for a beautiful monologue or a passage which exemplifies a certain theme, Spurgeon is completely aesthetically unselective. As she says, compiling an index means that

all the images are assembled, sorted, and examined on a systematic basis, the good with the bad, the disagreeable with the pleasant, the coarse with the refined, the attractive with the unattractive, and the poetical with the unpoetical (p. x, emphasis in the original).

Spurgeon lets the corpus guide her selection, using frequency to determine which words and themes she looks at more closely. In 1937, William Empson and George Garrett also categorise the forty-eight uses of ‘honest’ and ‘honesty’ in Othello, but they aim to formalise different kinds of meaning local to that particular play’s use of the theme, a theme of which scholars were also already aware.36 Spurgeon’s all-encompassing scope, in contrast, is indifferent to the operation or aesthetic power of each image. It therefore fulfils Moretti’s suggestion to try to ‘understand the system in its entirety’ by ‘not’ reading (p. 57), or, at least, not reading Shakespeare for his characters, comedy, or for the stage. Her attempt to understand Shakespeare’s metaphorical system in its entirety is the basis of her own claim to consistency. Spurgeon also describes her methods at the research stage in terms that resonate with Moretti’s. In a notebook held at the Folger she writes quotations from Shakespeare’s plays under the heading ‘[b]irds used to measure & describe things’: a passage from King Lear – ‘well / flown, bird!’ (4.vi.104-5) – and one from Romeo and Juliet – ‘no further than a wanton's bird’ (2.ii.178) (S.d.79). The two phrases play upon other idioms: respectively, a bird’s eye view and a flight into the unknown. Spurgeon sees the playwright’s metaphors as apt notations for the distance from which she scans his works. Some reviewers, such as Hyman, accuse Spurgeon of ‘superficiality’ (p. 95) because she reads at such a distance, but Moretti argues that distance ‘is a condition of knowledge’; that [w]e always pay a price for theoretical knowledge’ because whereas ‘reality is

36 William Empson and George Garrett, Shakespeare Survey (London: Brendin Publishing Company, 1937), p. 5. 95 infinitely rich; concepts are abstract, are poor’ (pp. 57-8). In the case of literary scholarship, Moretti believes that close reading pays a price because it ‘depends on an extremely small canon’ (p. 57). While Spurgeon surveys works that are extremely canonical, in order to synthesise Shakespeare’s imagery, she clearly ‘does not read’ the plays in the way most literary scholars would. Of course, Spurgeon does undertake some analytical work, though, when she decides what to count as a metaphor and to which theme she should assign it. In the ‘Preface’, she explains that her images ‘are not selected to point or to illustrate any preconceived idea or thesis, but they are studied, either as a whole, or in groups, with a perfectly open mind’ (p. x). Like Richards, then, Spurgeon effectively professes neutrality. But she qualifies her claim by once again downplaying her intellectual agency. The sheer numerousness of Spurgeon’s material means that it would be impossible for her to explain every judgment, but she also says that she is not interested in theorising the poetic image in general. She argues that she is simply concerned with its ‘content rather than the form’ (p. 8), again aligning herself with a machine that acts without contemplation. Spurgeon provides a straightforward definition of an ‘image’ as: ‘any and every imaginative picture or other experience […] which he uses, in the forms of simile and metaphor in their widest sense, for purposes of analogy’ (p. 5). She also points out that ‘any count […] is dependent on the literary judgment and methods of the person who has compiled it’ (p. 360). Her declaration of neutrality therefore does not invoke objectivity as Richards and the other Cambridge-based critics conceive of it; she argues instead that her subjectivity is consistent. Whereas Richards’s neutrality involves testing one’s object of study, and specifically testing its ability to suppress individual associations, Spurgeon seeks to observe the qualities of her object of study and actively accommodates both her object’s and her own idiosyncrasies. Reviewers often treat Shakespeare's Imagery as if it claims to be scientific, saying, as Cox does, that

it is constantly suggested through-out the book that we have here something scientific, that can be weighed and measured, something tangible and objective, susceptible of a statistical approach which will rule out such nebulous quantities as the reactions of personal sensibility (309-310).

But while Spurgeon employs some scientific principles, such as using a defined data set, repeating her research, and drawing conclusions from her data, she does not intend to rule out her own ‘personal sensibility’; she happily admits that this is her ‘own personal count’ (p. 360). She privileges quantitative measures over qualitative, saying in the appendix that she felt that in order to explore Shakespeare’s artistic choices she needed ‘actual statistics’ (p. 250), but she imagines 96 her work as observational, not investigative. Spurgeon is not trying to prove that Shakespeare is good, she is trying to find out what he is like. Her analysis is statistical and subjective. Spurgeon’s ‘personal count’ is quite literally concerned with Shakespeare’s personhood. After compiling the index, she uses it to explore ‘Shakespeare’s personality, temperament and thought’ (p. ix) and, comparing his images to the control group of other contemporary playwrights, tries to prove that his imagery ‘reveals his own idiosyncrasies, and not only the usages of his period’ (p. 43). Spurgeon’s conclusions are perhaps the most unusual aspect of her whole extraordinary project. She finds that Shakespeare’s images mostly originate from ‘the simplest everyday things’, ‘nature’, and ‘indoor life and customs’, which have been ‘derived from direct observation by the senses’ (p. 44). Indeed, like Spurgeon herself, he appears to be extremely interested in people, using them frequently in metaphors, or, ‘personifications, chiefly of states, qualities and emotions’ (p. 45). She also argues that the playwright therefore has an acute ‘sensitiveness’ (p. 69) of sight, smell, hearing, and taste, as well as being ‘intensely interested in and observant of everyday concrete things and events, especially in outdoor country life and the homely indoor routine’ (p. 29). She even speculates that because many of his images describe movement, he must be ‘a compactly well-built man, probably on the slight side’ (p. 29). In stark contrast with Eliot, who states that poetry is ‘not expression of personality, but an escape from personality’ (p. 48), Spurgeon proposes that the beauty of Shakespeare’s work is revealed in his very acts of escaping personality, in crafting desires into seemingly impersonal art. Citing Vernon Lee and Virginia Woolf as her inspiration, she says in the introduction:

In the case of a poet, I suggest it is chiefly through his images that he, to some extent unconsciously, ‘gives himself away’. He may be, and in Shakespeare's case is, almost entirely objective in his dramatic characters and their views and opinions, yet, the poet unwittingly lays bare his own innermost likes and dislikes, observations and interests, associations of thought, attitudes of mind and beliefs (p. 4, my emphasis).37

In contrast with Richards, Spurgeon believes that the artist can make ‘objective’ art, but they cannot be objective. Indeed, she feels that Shakespeare’s value is rooted in the uniqueness of his perceptions, not their universal appeal. For Spurgeon, the aesthetic is highly personal.

37 Spurgeon takes her epigraphs from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, ‘[e]very secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other’ and Vernon Lee’s The Handling of Words, ‘[t]he real revelation of the writer (as of the artist) comes in a far subtler way than by autobiography; and comes despite all effort to elude it;... For what the writer does communicate is his temperament, his organic personality, with its preferences and aversions, its pace and rhythm and impact and balance, its swiftness or languor. . .and this he does equally whether he be rehearsing veraciously his own concerns or inventing someone else’s’ (p. 2). Spurgeon also quotes Flaubert, but only mentions the ‘two distinguished women writers’ in the introduction (p. 4). 97

Many reviewers laugh at Spurgeon’s undoubtedly over-deterministic interpretations. Hyman, for example, sees her conclusions as a ‘fanciful and absurd portrait of Shakespeare’ (p. 100). But few disagree with the readings of Shakespeare’s images when she does delve more deeply, such as in the case of ‘the unusual predominance in [King John] of images of personification and bodily action’ (p. 95). Reviewers more frequently object to Spurgeon’s statistical analysis and biographical diagnoses on principle. Like Richards, they tend to argue that such a complex semantic operation as metaphor is sold woefully short by taxonomy. Cox, for example, claims that Shakespeare's Imagery ‘serves to show that there is no substitute for literary criticism’ and that it is ‘little more than an industrious search for such a substitute’ (p. 310). But Spurgeon is aware that she ‘pays a price’, as Moretti says, for her method. She believes that the imprecision inherent in translating poetry into statistics is in fact an apt reflection of the indeterminacy of metaphor. When Spurgeon briefly defines an ‘image’, she imagines it as a ‘little word-picture’,

a description or an idea, which by comparison or analogy, stated or understood, with something else, transmits to us through the emotions and associations it arouses, something of the ‘wholeness’, the depth and richness of the way the writer views […] in a way no precise description, however clear and accurate, can possibly do (p. 9, my emphasis).

She argues that because an image is not a straightforward comparison, qualitative analysis cannot elucidate all its workings either. Spurgeon’s seemingly pragmatic focus on the ‘stuff or content’ (p. 11) of the images is clearly rooted in a theory, too. The fact that she finds that Shakespeare has similar priorities is a little too convenient to not be the product of her personal readings. Perhaps surprisingly, her theory appears to have been inspired by Richards. In one notebook, she copies a section almost verbatim from his article ‘Science and Poetry’, in which he models empirical reading:

A poem – say W[o]rd[sworth’]s’s West[minste]r Bridge sonnet – is an experience – ten minutes of a person’s life. Read the poem aloud – 1st the sound of the words, for it is with the full bodies of the words the poet works, not with their printed signs. These image-bodies of the words. [are] v[ery]. import[ant]. Next arise various pictures in the mind’s eye – not of words – but of things for wh[ich]: the words stand. [my own experience. CS.] […] the experience divides into 2 streams (1) intellectual, (2) instinctive or emot[iona]l. (1) Easier to follow, but less important. It is made up of thoughts wh[ich]: point to or reflect things. But the instinctive stream deals with the things pointed to – Emotions & attitudes. […] In its use of words poetry is first the reverse of science. Not ∵ words are chosen to bear out all possibilities but one; but ∵ the 98

manner, tone, rhythm, cadence play upon our instincts & make them pick out the precise particular thought they need (S.d.79, my emphasis).38

Richards argues that poetic words are image-bodies, not signs, which conjure up things, not words, and that their purpose is to organise the meanings of the things they represent in one’s mind. This is an identifiably positivist theory concerned with perceiving and preserving the object in question. In Practical Criticism he states similarly that ‘[i]t is a grateful relief to pass from the nebulous world of intellectual and emotional accordances to definite questions of sensory fact’ (p. 42). The neologism ‘image-bodies’ suggests that reading poetry is a sensory experience that transcends the physical boundaries of the reader, that the poetic image should represent the object so vividly that it merges with their body. For Richards, reading poetry is essentially a process of transubstantiation; the image-object leaves a physical impression in the reader’s mind’s eye. For Richards, a poetic image is a more concrete object than the poet who creates it. Indeed, the poet appears nowhere in his description of the interpretative process. Spurgeon, however, appears to apply his ideas about ‘image-bodies’ literally. With the diminutive composite term, ‘little word-picture’, she nods to his abstract theory, yet analyses the reverse sensory process, moving from the playwright’s image back onto his body. She also differs from Richards when she imagines poetic images to be descriptive, seeing them as communicating through their own distinct medium, rather than invisibly conveying the object to the reader’s mind. While Richards sees the image as a vehicle for recreating the poet’s mind in the reader, Spurgeon sees it as a measure of the poet’s individuality. The most appropriate way of investigating the image is, therefore, also to measure, not to evaluate. Again, Spurgeon’s method aligns with recent work in literary sociologies. Heather Love, for example, explains that literary studies often sees ‘description […] as necessarily subordinate to the key activity of interpretation’, but claims that it can avoid ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’ close reading engenders (CBND p. 387). Elsewhere, whilst discussing the Natural History of an Interview project that ran in California in the 1950s, Love similarly argues that the ‘practices of observation and description’ constitute a kind of “noninterventionist” (CRTD p. 415) way of measuring experience in which the researcher does not probe and test, but records, like a scientific instrument. When Spurgeon cautiously explains her role in her analysis as mechanical, then, she tries to preserve the poetic image’s mediatory qualities, not its objectivity. Spurgeon’s modest, passive mechanicality may appear to reviewers as a lack of literary intuition, but it also offers her a way to measure without intervening in her object of study, who

38 She is quoting ‘Science and Poetry’ pp. 484-7. 99 is a person, albeit a long-dead one. When Spurgeon stakes the validity of her experiment on her ‘personal count’, she acknowledges a tension in the taxonomical impulse that Richards does not. Her simultaneous distance from the text and pursuit of the person behind it again speaks of an awareness of herself as a researcher which Richards does not appear to share. It is impossible to say whether Spurgeon’s methodological self-awareness derives from a gendered self-perception, or whether her incessant desire to be useful to others derives from her insecurities as a woman in academia, but her tendency to diminish her analytical agency fits the tropes I explore in Morley’s and Leavis’s life-writing in chapter one. Her tendencies were overlooked at the time, but the resurgence of literary sociologies and statistics suggests that Shakespeare’s Imagery rewards revisiting. As an early example of statistical literary analysis, Spurgeon’s highly personal index proffers a way of counting words that can accommodate the idiosyncratic and the individual.

Biographical Sociology

In this section I look at how the gendered features we see in Spurgeon’s statistical analysis – the aesthetically indifferent distant reading of texts as evidence relating to literary persons – appear in Edith Morley’s report on Women Workers in Seven Professions and Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public. Grouping these two texts together affords another angle on the problems with Richards’s categories in Practical Criticism, because all three scholars use texts as socially diagnostic tools. Unlike Spurgeon, who assesses Shakespeare’s individual traits, Morley and Leavis look at two collective phenomena: women working in academia and readers of bestselling books. Various scholars point out that Practical Criticism has methodological problems, such as Isobel Armstrong, who argues that ‘the time-honoured categories of practical criticism, were intended not to be tools for recognizing affect and responding to it but for controlling it’, but there are also ethical problems with Richards’s experiment.39 Looking at how Morley describes data collection alongside theories of the interview method by the report’s commissioners, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, I develop in this section my argument that human data cannot be both uninhibited and devoid of emotion or individuality. Turning next to Leavis’s work, I look at how she uses aesthetic qualities in literature as culturally diagnostic tools, with which she can categorise literary brows. I continue to trace the connections between these women’s methods and recent assays in literary sociology and, in Leavis’s case, her direct influence on British cultural studies.

39 Isobel Armstrong, ‘Textual harassment: The ideology of close reading, or how close is close?’, Textual Practice, 9:3, (1995), (401-420), p. 404. 100

Women Workers in Seven Professions was the Fabian Society Women’s Group’s first book and the Executive Committee considered it of ‘utmost value’.40 Routledge published a U.K. edition in 1913 and an American edition followed in 1914 with E. P. Dutton & Co. The main Fabian Society (who at this time included such luminaries as George Bernard Shaw) commended its methods and, after reading the book, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies asked the Women’s Group to ‘assist them with their statistical section’.41 The Group asked Morley to edit and introduce Women Workers in Seven Professions after she contributed an impressive section on ‘Women at the Universities and University Teaching as a Profession’.42 In 1914, she was appointed to their executive committee and went on to campaign with them for many years.43 In 1914, a special issue of The New Statesman appeared on ‘Women in Industry’, the magazine the Webbs had also recently founded, in which various members of the Women’s Group co-wrote essays elaborating on the book’s findings and making policy recommendations.44 Morley wrote her own account in an essay titled ‘The Economic Position of Women’.45 Women Workers in Seven Professions was one of several surveys of women in the workplace at the time, but the only one produced by a literary academic.46 In the age of impersonal literary criticism it was a bold, political look at women scholars’ personal circumstances. In Morley’s section on life in academia, she describes general working conditions, including common areas of discrimination, current numbers of women students and lecturers, training routes and qualifications, levels of promotion, and average salaries. In an appendix she also provides data on the funding available and current fees at specific universities. The information is strikingly basic: Morley explains, for example, that a ‘Dean or Tutor is responsible for the welfare and discipline of all women students’ (p. 18). This is because few of her readers would have had any knowledge of university life.47 A review in The Nation describes Women

40 London School of Economics Library, Fabian Society Collection, H21, ‘Minutes of Fabian Women’s Group Executive Committee 1913-1917’, December 3rd 1913. 41 H21, ‘Minutes of Fabian Women’s Group Executive Committee 1913-1917’, February 4th 1914; H34, ‘Fabian Women’s Group: Joint Committee of Fabian Research Department and Women’s Group minute book, 30 March 1915-17 October 1918: (1) Industrial Problems arising out of the War (2) Women in Industry’. 42 H20, ‘Fabian Women’s Group Executive Committee Meeting Minutes 1908-1913’, March 5th, June 4th, July 2nd 1913. 43 H21, ‘Minutes of Fabian Women’s Group Executive Committee 1913-1917’, Dec. 3rd 1913. 44 E/119/4, Item 4, The New Statesman: Special Issue on Women in Industry, Vol. II No. 46, Saturday February 21, 1914. 45 Edith Morley, ‘The Economic Position of Women: An Account of some Work attempted by the Fabian Women’s Group’, The Economic Review, Volume xxiv, No. 4 (October 1914), pp. 389-397. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 46 The Countess of Aberdeen edits a book on Women in Professions (1900), for example, featuring sections on women factory inspectors, medicine, librarians, clerical work, agriculture, science, and the arts. Countess of Aberdeen, Women in Professions (London: International Congress of Women, 1900). 47 Carol Dyhouse explains that in 1900, 16% of students were women and 1930, this had risen to 27%. Carol Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?: Women in British Universities 1870-1939 (London: UCL Press, 1995), p. 17. 101

Workers in Seven Professions as good, dispassionate research, saying that the book has a ‘calm and scientific spirit’ and claiming it is ‘impossible to summarise in a few lines the content of such a volume—which consists, indeed, mainly of facts and figures’.48 But its facts and figures are also argumentative, serving as a practical guide to help women find training and jobs and to negotiate better working conditions. As she explains in an advertisement for Women Workers in Seven Professions, the book ‘supplies reliable information’ and ‘will therefore be of the greatest use in helping girls to choose and prepare for their life-work’.49 Morley rather straightforwardly describes how life currently looks for women in universities in order to try to change how it will look in the future. As Sheila Rowbotham explains, using research to bring about reform was common around the turn of the twentieth century, when many well-to-do women began to undertake social work. Rowbotham says that the 1888 matchgirls’ strike, for example, galvanised many middle- and upper-class women to ‘report and investigate the conditions of working class women’s work’.50 As women observed lower-class working lives, Rowbotham explains that they began to see their subject matter ‘not as passive objects of pity but as people who had to organise’ (p. 63). Similarly, in her memoir Morley describes the Fabian Society’s aim as ‘the testing and discovery of truth and thus to the provision of ammunition for speakers and politicians.’51 For Morley, data collection is not a dispassionate act; it is a political mission. Collecting the data for the other chapters, which discuss medicine, nursing, health inspection, the civil service, secretarial work, and acting, was also an emotive process. Like Morley’s chapter, they feature a woman active in the profession’s reflections on her personal experiences and general statistics. But, in order to get women to provide these discussions, Morley says that they needed encouragement. In the foreword, she explains that ‘[t]he first step was to get women to speak out, to analyse their own difficulties and hindrances’ (p. xi). Another Fabian Women’s Group member, Ellen Smith, says that for her own survey of Wage Earning Women and Their Dependents, published the year after Morley’s, she also struggled to get women to talk about their experiences, which she attributed to

the dislike found among women of all classes to disclose anything about their own personal affairs, especially with regard to money—the outcome of the early Victorian

48 “Women Workers in Seven Professions”, The Nation 99.2579 (Dec 3rd, 1914), p. 664. 49 E/111/7, Advertising pamphlet for Women Workers in Seven Professions. 50 Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History: Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against It (London: Pluto Press, 1975), p. 62. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 51 University of Reading, Special Collections, Edith Morley Collection, MS 938/7/4, ‘Looking Before and After: Reminiscences of a Working Life’, p. 136. 102

idea that it is degrading for a gentlewoman to work for money, and that her men-folk are able and willing to support her.52

These participants needed positive discrimination in order to be honest. Morley says in Women Workers in Seven Professions that the Women’s Group intended to provide a space that accommodated ‘women speaking amongst women without diffidence or prejudice’, because having a ‘standpoint’ requires rejecting that of ‘her husband, or her brother, or of the men with whom she works, or even that which these persons imagine must naturally be hers’ (p. xii).53 For Morley, then, reliable data is not the product of suppressing one’s personal ‘standpoint’, it involves finding that very standpoint amongst the expectations and demands of other people’s. While Haraway’s use of the term ‘standpoint’ many decades later is coincidental, it does usefully highlight that these women share an interest in knowledge deriving from, as Haraway terms it, ‘particular and specific embodiment’ (p. 116). Morley’s method suggests that in order to get women, whose bodies society has historically tried to constrain both literally and through ideals of shape and proportion, to recount their unreserved personal beliefs, one must mitigate broader social biases, such as patriarchal ones. Morley’s methods also suggest that certain researchers in certain situations should not try to embody neutrality, either. She explains that the Women’s Group elicited their data through informal, friendly gatherings, inviting ‘women of experience and expert knowledge, from various quarters and of many types of thought, to discourse of what they best knew to audiences of women’ (p. xii). Later, they asked them to write pieces for the book. While observation bred empathy in women involved in social reform, then, at the point of observation they had to perform empathy, and sympathy, regardless of whether it was genuine. Similarly, Fabian Society founders Beatrice and Sidney Webb explain in their 1932 social work manual that the interview is an integral part of sociological data collection. Intimate and non-clinical, it should feel like a friendly, genuine exchange. The Webbs claim that it is therefore often more suited to women, saying that the ‘enjoyment of the play of your own personality with that of another, are gifts of rare value in the art of interviewing; and gifts which are, perhaps, more frequently characteristic

52 Ellen Smith, Wage-Earning Women and Their Dependents (London: The Fabian Society, 1915), p. 6. 53 This is strikingly similar to Virginia Woolf’s claim in Three Guineas that women who earn their own living will be in ‘possession of an influence that is disinterested’. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 174. 103 of the woman than of the man’.54 This is another example of the ‘emotion management’ that I discuss in chapter one.55 As Arlie Russell Hochschild explains,

The deferential behaviour of servants and women—the encouraging smiles, the attentive listening, the appreciative laughter, the comments of affirmation, admiration, or concern—comes to seem normal, even built into personality rather than inherent in the kinds of exchange that low-status people commonly enter into (pp. 84-5).

In the interview scenario, women researchers may have higher status than their participants, but they can utilise the deference they usually perform amongst men of their own class to elicit more authentic responses. By demonstrating that their relative status is usually lower, they can appeal across the class-divide. If they try to be neutral, however, they risk their respondents perceiving them as cold and aloof. Of course, I. A. Richards’s aim in the practical criticism experiments is not to get his students to open up about their personal lives. But Morley’s methods highlight the extent to which many of his assumptions about objectivity do not apply when one’s participants have politically contested identities. Richards claims, for example, that double anonymity (of text and student) ensures the students will respond honestly, but actively discourages honest responses that include ‘sentimentality’ or ‘stock responses’. Morley, in contrast, not only tries to encourage her participants to shed their inhibitions, understanding that this requires positive bias, she refrains from intervening with the data afterwards. There is a pragmatism in her methodological adaptiveness, which accepts the women’s partiality as an inevitable condition of her data collection. Like Spurgeon, Morley claims that her sources transcend ‘a particular school of thought’ or ‘personal views’ (p. xiv), but her version of researcher neutrality is the opposite of Richards’. For Morley, neutrality means conveying – not suppressing – the individual subjectivities in the data:

Allowance must, perhaps, in some cases be made for personal enthusiasm, or for the depression that arises from thwarted efforts and unfulfilled ideals. At any rate no attempt has been made to co-ordinate the papers or to give them any particular tendency. As a result, certain deductions may be made with some confidence (p. 4, my emphasis).

54 Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Methods of Social Study, with an introduction by T. H. Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 139-140. 55 Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 7. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 104

Although she apologises for the women’s ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘depression’, she reproduces their emotions without mediation. Similarly, in an essay for the Fabian Society on John Ruskin, she claims it is ‘unscientific to ignore’ human beings’ tendency to love and claims that society is ‘made up of individuals, and cannot, therefore, satisfactorily be regarded as an abstract theoretical entity’.56 While Morley aims to be a neutral conduit for her unneutral data, Richards imposes the idea that the ideal critic is neutral upon his data. Indeed, although he formulates categories of bad reading from his students’ responses, he has already decided what bad reading looks like. He does not let the data lead him; he is not curious about what his participants have to say, only about the ways in which they are right or wrong. As I argue in Spurgeon’s case, Morley’s tendencies appear to be the result of a gendered self-perception. Richards’s presumptions about bad reading and his lack of curiosity about his participants are important because they suggest a superiority over his participants. Morley, on the other hand, tries to level the power differential between herself and the women she surveys before, during, and after collecting their accounts. Morley is most obviously on a par with the women in the survey because she is one of them; she is also a woman working in a profession. She is thus both the subject and object of the study. It is again useful, then, to look at Heather Love’s work on sociology to see how such sociological methods might provide new models for literary reading. Love restates sociologist Bruno Latour’s suggestion, for example, that when a researcher lets participants engage in ‘‘self-description’’ the researcher gives away some of their ‘‘authority’’.57 Elsewhere, Love also argues that descriptive methods can potentially help the literary experimenter avoid wielding their “‘cultural capital’”, which she quotes Latour explaining, “is infinitely higher than those doing the study” (CBND p. 376). In another article, Love says that recent forays into ‘distant’ and ‘surface’ reading can ‘defer virtuosic interpretation in order to attempt to formulate an accurate account of what the text is like’; to complement ‘what, in the text, is descriptive’ with description (CRTD p. 412). Through a combination of anti- hermeneutic analysis and self-documentation, then, literary ‘self-description’ might renege the common ethical traps of data collection. Morley also tries to equalise her status by casting herself as an assistant. Like Spurgeon, she suggests that others might have done better things with the data:

Some literary defects and absence of unity are, by nature of the scheme, inevitable: we hope these are counterbalanced by the collection of first-hand evidence from those in a position to speak authoritatively of the professions which they follow. […] For other

56 Edith Morley, John Ruskin and Social Ethics (London: Fabian Society, 1916), p. 11. 57 Love quotes Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (CBND p. 376). 105

defects in selection, arrangement, proportion and the like, I am alone responsible. I have, from the first, been conscious that many people were better suited to the editorial task than myself—women with more knowledge of social and economic problems, and, perhaps, with more leisure (p. v).

Morley presents herself as assistive in the sense of being both useful and secondary, much like she does when discussing her teaching, as I explore in chapter one. The tasks she describes, ‘collection’, ‘selection’, and ‘arrangement’, have the same mechanical quality to them that we see in Spurgeon’s work. She also shares Spurgeon’s impression that being a researcher involves passively relaying ‘first-hand evidence’ precisely because the individuality and subjectivity of that evidence is what makes it important. In Morley’s account of her own methods, the irrepressible variety of her participants’ accounts overshadow their self-effacing editor. Her conception of statistical analysis is therefore distinctly feminine, being characterised by modesty, mechanicality, and non-interpretative analysis. Morley’s selective method is also typical of the women scholars I am looking at because it has a political aim: women’s experience of the professions is proof that their circumstances need improving. As Morley remarks emphatically: ‘[t]he present economic position of women bristles with anomalies’ (p. xi). Indeed, she knows that her statistics are not necessarily accurate, because there is no average experience for women at this time. Morley is acutely aware from her own negotiations with Reading University (which are in their second phase whilst she is compiling Women Workers in Seven Professions in 1912) that pay, teaching duties, and professional values are highly individual to institutions. The research is urgent because there is currently a gap between law and reality: ‘[l]ectureships, assistant lectureships, and demonstratorships’ might now be ‘open to women in practice as well as in theory’, but ‘much depends on the personal idiosyncrasy of the head of the department’ (p. 17). Essentially, because professional women’s socio-political status is in such flux, it is impossible to find representative samples or make broad conclusions. But Morley does not think that the aim of the feminist movement should be to equalise individuals, either. As she outlines in her article about the book, she believes that ‘equal opportunities […] signifies not sameness, but variety’ (p. 391). In Morley’s eyes, women’s experiences should be gloriously anomalous, apart from their experiences of socio-economic hardship. Collecting their self-descriptions with their emotions intact is her effort to help women live more varied lives.

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Literary Anthropology

I now take up the concerns raised by Morley’s work about the researcher’s role with a study that collects data from people, yet is interested in literary issues: Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public (1932). Starting life as her PhD thesis, which was supervised by Richards, she says that she was prompted to undertake her research by a ‘general question’: ‘[w]hat has happened to fiction and the reading public since the eighteenth century?’ (p. xiv). To answer this question, Leavis collects evidence from multiple sources, most notably using a ‘questionnaire’ (p. 33) sent out by post, which featured such questions as ‘What in your opinion makes a great bestseller?’ and ‘What is your favourite reading?’ (pp. 43, 45). Extraordinarily, though, she does not collect her data from the reading public. Leavis explains that she instead ‘found it advisable to invite the collaboration of a number of the most popular living novelists’ (p. 33)—in other words, expert readers. Leavis’s book is a useful focal point for the threads I have discussed so far in this chapter, because she uses literary responses for diagnostic purposes, like Richards and Spurgeon, but draws socio-political conclusions, like Morley. Furthermore, while she treats her data as if it is honest and aware, like Morley, she distances herself from her actual object of study, by collecting data from other participants. I encapsulate these threads about Leavis’s self-perception and use of distance by asking what she means when she calls her study ‘anthropological’ (p. xv). Leavis’s thesis is practically identical to the published version of Fiction and the Reading Public, but the former carries a subtitle: ‘A study in social anthropology’.58 The project has all the hallmarks of social science; Leavis identifies an object of study, translates it into measurable phenomena, defines a representative sample group, collects raw data, and draws conclusions from it. But why choose the term ‘anthropology’ over ‘sociology’? The Oxford Dictionary of Social Sciences states that ‘[m]odern anthropology […] has its roots in the explosion of interest in “primitive” societies encountered in the course of European exploration, conquest, and colonial rule’, while sociology is the ‘scientific study of society, including patterns of social relationships, social action, and culture.’59 Broadly speaking, then, both disciplines study society and culture, but while sociology studies its own society, anthropology looks at something unfamiliar from afar. The distinction lies, then, in the difference and distance between the researcher and their object of study. As the Oxford Dictionary notes, historically, Western anthropological inquiry has

58 Q. D. Leavis, ‘Fiction and the Reading Public: A study in social anthropology’, Ph.D. 468, Cambridge University Library, 1931. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 59 Craig Calhoun, ed., Oxford Dictionary of Social Sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 15, 455. 107 presumed that its view of an object is superior even to the object’s view of itself. Yet Leavis surveys British literary culture. So how is her study ‘anthropological’? In the 1965 essay, ‘A Glance Backward’, Leavis says that as a student of H. M. Chadwick (Cambridge’s Chair of Anglo-Saxon at the time) she ‘acquired an anthropological attitude’ because he made his students study ‘archaeology, myth, folk-lore, religious rites, early architecture and other arts’.60 She explains that, like an anthropologist, Chadwick taught other cultures, such as Norse and ‘early Irish and Welsh literatures’ (p. 10). In Fiction and the Reading Public, however, Leavis does not study a culture distant in time or space, but in class and, specifically, cultural education. Thus, while her decision to study an ordinary literary audience mimics Chadwick’s use of quotidian cultural artefacts, which have social as well as aesthetic significance, her decision to study her own culture implies that she sees herself as substantially distant from it. This accords with the Leavises’ reputed cultural elitism, but Q. D. Leavis’s relationship to the reading public is more complex than her husband’s because she, like the reading public, is a feminised reader. Is Leavis therefore as far from the reading public as the term ‘anthropological’ suggests? Leavis’s main concern in Fiction and the Reading Public is that ‘[s]erious book-buying has not increased in proportion to literacy’ (p. 4); that ‘the book-borrowing public has acquired the reading habit while somehow failing to exercise any critical intelligence about its reading’ (p. 7). Leavis blames this phenomenon on the commercialisation of publishing, saying that ‘the periodical is virtually dependent upon the advertiser’ (p. 14) and mostly full of ‘gossip’ (p. 20), and new forms of mass media, such as the cinema, which is increasingly controlled by ‘Big Business’ (p. 17). But she also blames readers for lacking the discipline to reject society’s cultural offerings. She says, for example, that buying fiction has become ‘a form of the drug habit’ (p. 7) and that ‘the cheap and easy pleasures offered by the cinema, the circulating library, the magazine, the news- paper, the dance-hall, and the loud-speaker is too much for almost every one’ (pp. 224-5). Furthermore, she singles out women as the most responsible party. In her introductory discussion, Leavis says that it is significant that ‘women rather than men change the books (that is, determine the family reading)’ (p. 7) and reproduces a letter to a newspaper in order to explain that, once again, the problem is poor self-control:

The writer of ‘a bona-fide experience’ relates in the Manchester Evening News how when he went into Mudie's to change a novel for his wife the assistant produced a ‘detective story

60 Q. D. Leavis, ‘A Glance Backwards, 1965’, in Collected Essays, Volume 1, ed. by G. S. Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 11. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 108

by J. S. Fletcher and a romantic adventure by W. J. Locke’ explaining that ‘if a woman is taken up with a house all day, she doesn't want tales about married problems or misunderstood wives she knows enough about these already; she can't be bothered with dialect after a day’s work, and historical novels aren't alive enough. What she enjoys is something that is possible but outside her own experience you see if I’m not right.’ The writer adds ‘And she was’ (pp. 8-9).

Leavis acknowledges the cause of the problem – that women have enormous amounts of housework – just as she acknowledges the influence of capitalism on cultural production. But she blames women in particular for not being able to transcend their circumstances and seek out stimulating culture. Furthermore, she derogates feminine modes of reading. Just as Richards disapproves of sentimentality and terms such as beauty, Leavis singles out feminine genres (romance) and affects (escapism—in other words, pleasure). As I discuss in the previous chapter, Leavis was a state-educated lower-middle class Jewish student at Cambridge during a time when women were a conspicuous minority and many people associated Jewishness with femininity. In other words, she was a likely candidate for being feminised by other scholars. One of her fellow Cambridge scholars, F. L. Lucas, for example, describes Fiction and the Reading Public as ‘grovelling’, ‘petulant’, ‘sectarian nagging’, and betraying ‘a secret craving for romance’.61 As I mention in the previous chapter, in the same essay Lucas calls Leavis ‘Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land Busy’ (p. 286), so it would not be presumptuous to see a gendered tone in terms such as ‘nagging’ amongst his tirade of insults. More assumptions that Leavis’s intellectual abilities are typically feminine have appeared posthumously. Biographers often discuss Leavis primarily in relation to her husband, F. R. Leavis, and in the case of Fiction and the Reading Public several scholars assume that her work is so heavily influenced by him to be, essentially, derivative. Most notably, in John Sutherland’s introduction to the 2001 edition of Fiction and the Reading Public he claims that the thesis was ‘a continuation into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of F. R. L.’s dissertation – the first of their collaborative ventures’.62 This statement suggests not only that F. R. Leavis contributed work to the project, but that he conceived of the initial idea. Q. D. Leavis, in this account, appears as merely a mechanical researcher carrying out his instructions (much as reviewers cast Spurgeon). There are similarities between their work: F. R.’s thesis makes similar broad, vague proclamations about social ills,

61 F. L. Lucas, ‘English Literature’, in University Studies: Cambridge 1933, ed. by Harold Wright (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1933), pp. 284, 285, 287. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 62 Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, with an Introduction by John Sutherland (London: Pimlico, 2000), p. ix. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 109 such as, that ‘[s]ociety had become so complex that no code of urbanity could win general allegiance’.63 Q. D. openly acknowledges F. R.’s influence on the project in the thesis:

For Part II Chapter I I am heavily indebted to an unpublished Ph.D. thesis by F. R. Leavis called The Relationship of Journalism to Literature: from Nashe to Johnson, and also for research carried out and embodied in the same thesis on Defoe (p. ii).

The main difference in their work is that F. R. does not elicit new data. Instead, he examines journals such as The Spectator and Tatler, along with canonical writers, such as Dryden, Defoe, and Johnson. The most unconventional aspect of Q. D.’s work, the data collection, is her own innovation. Indeed, the chain of influence may well have led in the opposite direction. A year after Fiction and the Reading Public was published, F. R. Leavis wrote with Denys Thompson Culture and Environment, a practical guide for teaching textual analysis in schools. The book quotes extensively from Fiction and the Reading Public (in sections on book distribution, literary committees, advertisements, and escapism) and frequently suggests the reader consult it for further examples and analysis.64 But it does not explicitly credit Fiction and the Reading Public. Although Culture and Environment takes up Q. D. Leavis’s concerns about the power of advertising, ‘mob passions’ (p. 17), whether a book should be ‘readable’ (p. 40), and what a ‘capacity for appreciating’ literature looks like (p. 51), it uses very little argumentation. Mostly comprising reading lists and sample questions for classroom discussions, is written as if the reader inevitably shares its viewpoint; as if the reader has already made up their mind whilst reading Fiction and the Reading Public. There are also a curious number of references to ‘experiment’, ‘analysis’, ‘classification’, and ‘field-work’ (p. 18) in the later book, which makes it look as though the authors have conducted this rigorous research themselves. But, as F. R. Leavis mentions in 1974, his material was ‘taken from the documentation accumulated for Fiction and the Reading Public’.65 Like other scholars, then, Q. D.’s husband does not credit her with either performing or devising analytical field-work. Sutherland makes another claim about Q. D.’s influences: that she ‘owes’ a ‘debt’ to Richards’s ‘scientism’ (pp. xii-xiii). While this term aptly communicates the way that Richards engages with scientific principle in rather haphazard, broad strokes, it also diminishes Leavis’s intellectual input. Leavis states in the thesis – but not the book – that she is ‘aware of

63 F. R. Leavis, The Relationship of Journalism to Literature: from Nashe to Johnson, Cambridge University Library Ph.D.66, 1924, p. 220. 64 See pp. 38, 40, 43-44, 54, 99-101. 65 F. R. Leavis, Letters in Criticism, ed. by John Tasker (London: Chatto & Windus, 1974), p. 58. 110 indebtedness for exemplification of method’ for Part III (‘The Significance of the Bestseller’) to Practical Criticism (p. i). She quotes Richards several times in this section, saying that ‘much of what Mr. Richards says of poetry can be adapted to apply to the novel’ and that she is ‘adopting the division of Meaning into Sense, Tone, Feeling, and Intention made in Practical Criticism’ (pp. 212, 214). But, in the thesis, she goes on to claim that her ‘method of working and presentation’, ‘organisation and structural system’ and ‘substance of the material on which this essay is founded’ are all ‘original’ (p. i). The distinction between how Leavis describes Richards’s method and her own – ‘exemplification of method’, compared with ‘method of working’, ‘structural system’, and ‘material’ – mirrors how Richards and Spurgeon define their roles differently. Like Spurgeon, who applies Richards’s ‘image-bodies’ onto literal literary bodies, Leavis turns his ‘exemplification’ into a ‘working’ method. While Sutherland assumes that she is the technician following Richards’s lead, Leavis performs the arguably more dexterous task of formulating his exemplification as a working analytical practice. If other scholars do indeed feminise Leavis, by painting her as something of an intellectual lackey, does this change her relationship to her subject-matter? Does it make her study more, or less, anthropological? I want to argue that it does change her relationship to her object of study, because, like Spurgeon’s and Morley’s, it indicates that she does not see her role as one entitled to meddle. Leavis and Richards both study literary taste because they wish to change it, and both collect data from an elite set of readers. But within their respective attempts at data collection, Richards has much higher “cultural capital”, to use Latour’s phrase, than his participants. His undergraduates may well go on to great things – indeed, Q. D. and F. R. Leavis were among his cohort – but in the classroom at that moment they are students, whilst he is their instructor and future examiner. Sneering at housewives reading romances is therefore fundamentally different to being ‘ill with laughter’ at one’s students primarily because one has direct power over those students. But it is also different because Leavis does not actually ask housewives about their reading. While her decision to ask writers about their readers might appear elitist, it in fact saves the latter group from another surreptitious test, because, although Leavis chastises the reading public, she does not end up classifying them after all. The group who receive her taxonomical scrutiny are in fact the writing public. When Leavis receives replies to her questionnaire, she performs another unconventional manoeuvre: she doesn’t categorise what the novelists say about the reading public, but what their comments say about their own literary taste. Furthermore, rather than providing definitions for her categories, she only provides examples, such as: 111

While C admire B, or would like to write like the class A type of novelist, and B1 and B2 also admire such highbrow novelists as Stendhal, Proust, Dostoievsky, Henry James, Conrad, Lawrence, and Joyce, and claim to have been influenced by them, B3 and B4 admire indiscriminately A and B novelists. As one might expect, the single representative of A passes only his own kind, but for a reason to be noticed later has a certain admiration for the great bestsellers. D mostly recognise candidly that each other's novels are ‘bad’ i.e. pernicious or contemptible as literature, but are prepared to defend their own as ‘clean entertainment’ (p. 46).

Presumably, she asks these novelists to fill in her questionnaire because she thinks that they know better than their readers what those readers like and why. But she believes she knows better than the novelists what kinds of novelists they are. She does not tell her participants that she will use their comments for this purpose or that they will feed into a general thesis that current literary culture is feeble and exploitative. Yet, like all the scholars whose work I look at in this chapter, Leavis claims that she examines her material ‘in an unbiassed but inquisitive frame of mind’ (p. xv) and ‘produc[es] evidence rather than asserting [it] […] from a preconceived theory’ (p. xvi). Clearly, though, she does have preconceived theories: about the aesthetic judgment of her participants. Her taxonomy is as pre-determined as her supervisor’s. Leavis and Richards differ, however, in how much awareness they deign to attribute to their participants. Leavis treats the novelists’ comments on readers as expert evidence, which therefore does not need interpreting:

Quotations from readers’ letters that D novelists gave in answer to Q. 10 show that fiction for very many people is a means of easing a desolating sense of isolation and compensates for the poverty of their emotional lives:

You have the power by your exquisite sympathy of making your characters live. They become one's friends. […]

and one of the most popular women writers reported simply ‘Of course they all say "How real!"’ while another, not much less popular, replied:

I imagine the bulk of my readers to be fairly simple people (mostly women) who want to read of romance in a form not incompatible with their own opportunities (p. 58).

Here, Leavis describes the data as transparent content. The novelists have the capacity to ‘show’ and ‘report’, what they ‘imagine’ about readers is reliable. But she still uses the data diagnostically; she simply defers to their diagnoses about readers. If readers prefer romance 112 novels, for example, this indicates a need to escape monotonous wage-labour. If a novelist likes middle-brow and high-brow fiction indiscriminately, this means they are middle-brow. In both cases, Leavis bases her categories on one’s ability to successfully discern cultural hierarchies and, where the novelists are concerned, their own place in it. In other words, she assesses how aesthetic qualities communicate socio-economic status. Like Spurgeon and Morley, then, Leavis treats her textual data as ‘stuff and content’, capable of indicating something beyond itself. Leavis does not only treat her data as social commentary. She also cites Gerty MacDowell, from Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, as a victim of popular culture:

for Gerty MacDowell every situation has a prescribed attitude provided by memories of slightly similar situations in cheap fiction, she thinks in terms of clichés drawn from the same source, and is completely out of touch with reality. Such a life is not only crude, impoverished, and narrow, it is dangerous (p. 245).

In ‘A Glance Backward’, she explains that she decided to study ‘books widely read though of no permanent literary merit’, because they ‘provide evidence as to the quality of living and enable us to ask pertinent questions about the nature of a community or society’ (p. 10). Studying the novel feminises Leavis in two ways. Firstly, because, as I explore in chapter four, choosing to study the novel is bold for a woman graduate in the ’30s, when academia had not wholly accepted this purportedly leisurely, amateur (in other words, feminine) literary medium. Thus, when Leavis makes the claim at the beginning of Fiction and the Reading Public that there is ‘a kind of interest in fiction’ (p. xiii) that has not yet been satisfactorily explored by the ‘critic’s’ (aesthetically evaluative) or the ‘scholar’s’ (philological) methods (p. xiv), she ventures much further into the literary unknown than either her husband or supervisor. Essentially, Leavis argues that the novel demands anthropological criticism. The second way that studying the novel feminises Leavis, then, is by encouraging her to use diagnostic analysis. Other aspects of reading novels also evoke gendered tropes. As I discuss in chapter four, Leavis believes that practical criticism is not appropriate for the novel because it is so expansive.66 At various points in Fiction and the Reading Public, too, she says that a novel demands extensive reading and holistic treatment. When she says, for instance, that the ‘reading capacity of the general public […] has never been so low as at the present time’ (p. 231), she implies that appetite and pliability are important qualities in a reader. In an appendix, she provides an ‘Outline

66 She says in Fiction and the Reading Public, for example, that ‘[t]he critic of the novel [...] cannot even cite a chapter (the equivalent of a stanza or a line), and the paragraph or two that he may reasonably quote is too short an extract to set up the rhythm of the book’ (p. 213). 113 of Popular Fiction’: a list of significant popular works of fiction covering several centuries (and thus an intriguing alternative to the literary canon), including Bunyan, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, and Kipling (pp. 330-5). Leavis may regret the abundance of mass culture, but she is not intimidated by it. She describes her own reading as voracious, too, in her unpublished memoir:

Whereas [F.R. Leavis] examined the entire output of any poet who interested him, on whatever grounds and of whatever period, he did not, as I thought necessary, read or at least look through the entire oeuvre of a novelist (p. 27).

Leavis appears machine-like here, once again like Spurgeon and Morley, easily devouring classic novels. Her capacious reading resembles Moretti’s recent work, such as his recent survey on ‘Seven Thousand Titles’ of British novels. Indeed, her work in Fiction and the Reading Public calls into question Moretti’s claim in this article that ‘we have never really tried to read the entire volume of the literary past’ (p. 158), because, although she does not succeed, she certainly has a vast, comprehensive view of contemporary fiction and the reading public. The only difference between Leavis and the housewives she studies, then, is the literariness of her reading matter. Is this why Leavis uses the term anthropology, to assume the kind of expert position Richards assumes over his students over the feminised readers she studies? Looking backwards at the influence of H. M. Chadwick provides one explanation – that Leavis was inspired by contemporary academic discourse – but looking forwards in time to researchers she inspired provides another. Leavis’s book was a major influence on the foundational figures of the British cultural studies movement, Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, and Richard Hoggart. All three praise Fiction and the Reading Public in the highest terms: Hall calls it a ‘classic study’, Williams states that it is the ‘standard work’ on popular fiction, Hoggart says it is ‘one of the half- dozen most important critical texts’.67 They also note, though, that Leavis lays the blame on working class subjects. Hoggart, for example, describes Leavis as ‘distant […] as if she had a peg on her nose’.68 For him, critical distance is a sign of superiority. But Stuart Hall’s reading of the term suggests that the situation is more complex. He explains her ‘anthropological’ approach with an example, saying ‘popular fantasy relies upon familiar themes and situations and follows a recognized pattern’.69 Hall implies, then, that in order to critique a familiar cultural object one

67 Stuart Hall, The Popular Arts (London: Hutchinson Educational, 1964), p. 165; Williams, Raymond, ‘Books for Teaching ‘Culture and Environment,’’ in John McIlroy and Sallie Westwood, eds., Border Country: Raymond Williams in Adult Education (Leicester: NIACE, 1993), 174-80 (p. 176); Richard Hoggart, ‘Cultural Questions and Answers’, The Guardian (1959-2003), November 5 1965, p. 12. 68 Mark Gibson and John Hartley, “Forty Years of Cultural Studies: An Interview with Richard Hoggart”, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 1.1 (1998), 11–23 (p. 14). 69 Stuart Hall, The Popular Arts (London: Hutchinson Educational, 1964), p. 165. 114 needs to distance oneself from it, to defamiliarize it. There might therefore be some merit in an anthropological view of one’s own culture, in which one must reconstruct ‘themes’ and ‘situations’ anew to see their patterns. Leavis’s use of the term anthropology is therefore a wholly appropriate choice to illustrate the fact that, as one of very few women in literary academia in the early twentieth century, she is now viewing women readers and feminine reading matter from the outside.

Partial Objectivity

Morley’s sociology, Spurgeon’s taxonomy, and Leavis’s cultural anthropology all test the boundaries of what literary academia considers appropriate methods and objects of enquiry. The key difference between their work and the Cambridge-based critics’ is where the analytical distance lies: for the women, because they study literary persons, the distance is between critic and subject-matter, rather than critic and text. They see a text as evidence with which to diagnose a human and social phenomenon, performing an act of translation between these media. This act of translation maintains the distance from the text’s qualities as a text but approaches the phenomenon, in this case a literary person or persons, closely. Close reading, on the other hand, keeps the text close and the person behind the text – the author – at arm’s length. Their work therefore brings a different perspective to recent debates about distant reading. Whereas Franco Moretti argues that distance is always a feature of knowledge production, these women’s methods look at the situation from the other angle, suggesting that closeness is always a feature too. Whereas Heather Love argues that there is something invasive about close reading’s hermeneutic model, that it ‘splays culture in order to reveal its working parts’ (CRTD p. 409), Morley, Spurgeon, and Leavis suggest that one simply chooses to be close to one’s data or one’s object of study. These women create statistical analysis with a wholly different focus to the impersonal objectivity espoused by Eliot, Richards, Empson, and others. Their research is indifferent to aesthetic values: Spurgeon’s index treats all images equally, Morley addresses the material conditions of being a literary scholar, Leavis’s questionnaire translates aesthetic judgements into social hierarchy. The question is: do they do so because they are women? My argument in this chapter is essentially biographical, like their criticism. I would venture that Morley, Spurgeon, and Leavis use statistical analysis because their socio-political situation – i.e., a hostile, masculinist intellectual culture – means that they seek to bolster their credibility, but cannot imagine themselves, as feminised intellectuals, within the discourse of impersonal criticism. Following 115

Haraway, I want to argue, however, that they are not intrinsically more conscientious researchers because they are women, but because this particular intellectual culture encourages them to study pressing political issues, for example, and discourages them from exploiting the hermeneutic privileges they hold over their participants. Their research suggests, then, that the ‘particular and specific embodiment’ that academia foisted upon them by feminising their minds and their work may be the only position from which one can represent experiences of oppression. Indeed, within the history of literary studies, their statistics have a uniquely informative position, precisely because they are illustriously partial in every sense of the word: biased, incomplete, flawed.

The Room Behind the Mind: Queer Collegiate Reading

University does not and never did imply a school of universal learning Edith Morley, c. 1940

What is to be said for the female smoking-room that has set its approval on Miss Sayers? Q. D. Leavis, 1937

Women in College

In this chapter, I look at three different kinds of writing by women about college life in the early twentieth century: scholars’ life-writing about collegiate communities, former graduates’ fictional depictions of college, and scholars’ critical responses to those depictions. I use this writing to craft two main arguments. Firstly, that women scholars tend to present colleges as queer environments and read representations of them in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes as a ‘paranoid’ manner.1 While various contemporary writers, including sexologists Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, both discuss the phenomenon of ‘gay college life’, academic women’s writing rarely mentions homosexuality explicitly, instead encoding queerness into character tropes, symbolism, ellipses, and literary references.2 Many of these codes rely on an intimate knowledge of life in women’s colleges. My second argument is therefore that one cannot read women’s writing about college life in the early twentieth century according to the principles of practical criticism because women shroud their experiences in highly localised codes and tropes. One cannot, to quote Q. D. Leavis’s contemporary, Joan Bennett, read only the ‘words on the page’ of women’s college narratives, because they involve distinctly gendered rituals and references.3

1 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 125. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 2 Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, quoted in Anna Bogen, Women and University Fiction, 1880-1945 (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 144. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 3 Joan Bennett remarks that ‘[t]he impact of [I. A. Richards’s] work perhaps gave rise to too exclusive emphasis upon the words on the page’. Joan Bennett, ‘How it Strikes a Contemporary’, in Reuben Brower, et al., eds, I. A. Richards: Essays in His Honour (Oxford University Press: New York, 1973), pp. 58, xv. 117

In the early decades of the twentieth century, women’s colleges are the site of many fraught contradictions. Women entering universities gain access, often for the first time, to libraries, intellectual conversation, unstructured free time, and, rendering Virginia Woolf’s famous 1928 demand somewhat anachronistic, a room of one’s own. But the university ensures that women students also know their place. Rita McWilliams Tullberg explains that at Cambridge, even after women become members of the university, there are quotas on their numbers for decades, curfews and chaperonage rules restrict their movement, and hostility from male students and staff create the sense that women are ‘barely tolerated guests’.4 Academia may grant women opportunities to become intellectual leaders such as teachers, scholars, or writers, but also often sees them as hopelessly intellectually inferior. Arnold Bennett writes in the 1920s, for example, that ‘intellectually and creatively man is the superior of woman’ and that this is a situation that ‘no amount of education and liberty of action will sensibly alter’.5 The fact that women now study is still a sign not that they are capable thinkers, but that they are merely trying and failing to emulate men. But when women enter higher education, they gain the time, space, and intellectual community to begin narrating their own lives. As Kate Flint argues, when women readers become women writers, the ‘heterogeneity of reading practices even among women of similar class and intellectual interest’ quickly becomes apparent.6 It is difficult to overstate how important colleges were in the early twentieth century for allowing women to study, work, and socialise without male intrusion. Yet, especially in the earliest writing I look at here, from the turn of the century, women often portray college as a space defined by strict expectations to host and entertain and not, as men’s colleges are often portrayed, a place where one can forget financial or domestic concerns. But they also present them as places that can undermine conventional gender roles, allowing opportunities for intimacy outside of heterosexuality and detaching domestic responsibilities from familial roles. In other words, women depict colleges as queer environments. My definition of ‘queer’ follows Eve Sedgwick, who says that the term signals:

4 Rita McWilliams Tullberg, Women at Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 1. 5 Arnold Bennett, Our Women: Chapters on the Sex-Discord (London, 1920), pp. 101, 104, quoted in Kate Flint, ‘Revising Jacob's Room: Virginia Woolf, Women, and Language’, The Review of English Studies, Vol. 42, No. 167 (Aug., 1991), 361-379 (p. 375). 6 Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 230. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 118

the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.7

There are several explicit references to queerness in the texts I discuss in this chapter. The culprit in Dorothy Sayers’s 1935 novel, Gaudy Night, for example, claims that ‘“clever ladies are a bit queer”’.8 Muriel Bradbrook, literary scholar, early Girtonian and later Mistress of the college, describes a character in another university novel from the period, Rosamund Lehmann’s Dusty Answer (1927), as having ‘crypto-Lesbian affections’.9 In this chapter, however, I am more interested in how women disguise queerness in ways that only a knowledge of college life reveals. Women’s writing about college was a watershed moment for women’s literary culture. Anna Bogen explains that by the time Gaudy Night is published, women are for the first time authoring more novels set in universities than men (p. 136). These novels are a vital window into how early women students and scholars experienced higher education, sensing its possibilities and its constraints. Yet very little has been written about women’s university narratives. In his 1957 book on The English University Novel, Mortimer Proctor briefly mentions women’s contributions to the genre as a ‘quaint and unpreposterous bypath’.10 Quoting Nathaniel Hawthorne, Proctor describes women who pen fiction set in colleges as a ‘damned tribe of scribbling women’ (p. 149). Anna Bogen’s 2015 book on Women’s University Fiction revises Proctor’s assessment and is the most thorough investigation to date. One of my starting points for this chapter, though, is Bogen’s statement that in Virginia Woolf’s short story ‘A Woman’s College From Outside’, which I look at in the first section, ‘the only meaningful sexual contact [the characters] achieve is with each other’ (p. 157). I go on to argue that the way that Woolf’s protagonist initially describes a touch as a kiss shows that such contact is highly meaningful. Indeed, qualification is one way literary women encrypt collegiate queerness in the early twentieth century, along with other linguistic gestures towards some unspecified promise, such as invitations. Another detractor, John Schellenberger, says that ‘novels about female students in the early years of university education for women have less to interest the literary critic than the

7 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 8. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 8 Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1970), p. 116. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 9 Bradbrook was Mistress of Girton between 1968 and 1976. Muriel Bradbrook, ‘That Infidel Place’: A Short History of Girton College, 1869-1969 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969), p. 114. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text abbreviated as TIF. 10 Mortimer Proctor, The English University Novel (Berkley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 135. 119 social historian’.11 But what I want to explore in this chapter is how literature on life in women’s colleges creates specific systems of referentiality as a mode of expressing the social phenomenon of entering academia. Indeed, if studying literature at university allowed women to write in unprecedented numbers, then, counter to the principles of practical criticism, surely the conditions within which writing happens do affect its aesthetic qualities. Indeed, Lilian Faderman explains that by the 1920s, fiction had begun to downplay the significance of lesbian relationships, by presenting them as a temporary phenomenon, ‘attributable to the peculiarities of time and location’ at college.12 Faderman goes on to explain, though, that even when explicit references to homosexuality were officially censored, such as in America in this period, this simply made fictional women’s colleges more clearly a hint at lesbianism (p. 309). Suppressing queerness forced it to become fugitive; it did not disappear, it just appeared in different ways. Coding is a key characteristic of early-twentieth-century women’s university fiction. Usually, metaphorical coding is a closed reference system: such as, how a dove means peace in Christian symbolism, not freedom, as a bird conceivably might in other contexts, or purity, as white does elsewhere. But queer coding is often more semantically ambiguous. A long-standing practice, ranging from re-appropriating Greek names like ‘lesbian’ and ‘sapphism’ to dialects like Polari, queer codes do not necessarily need to communicate specific meanings, such as peace, but simply the fact that coding is happening. In Codes of the Underworld, Diego Gambetta argues that communities society has historically seen as deviant use coding so that it is only visible to those in the know, because

An effective signalling code can spare agents from time-wasting, embarrassing conversations and favour encounters between people of compatible preferences, as well as pass unnoticed by all those who ignore the existence of the code.13

In the 1920s, a college setting for a novel effectively means queer possibilities, not in grammatical terms, as the word ‘unnatural’ means queer, but as a semantic environment, which encourages the reader to read more into what the narrative explicitly says. In the first section of this chapter, I discuss two representations of women’s college bedrooms set in fictionalised versions of Cambridge colleges: successful children’s author L. T.

11 John Schellenberger, ‘Fiction and the first women students’, Higher Education Quarterly, 36 (Autumn 1982), 352- 358 (p. 358). 12 Lilian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Women's Press, 1985), p. 309. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 13 Diego Gambetta, Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 167-8. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 120

Meade’s novel, A Sweet Girl Graduate (1891), set in a reinterpretation of Girton College, and Virginia Woolf’s short story, ‘A Woman’s College From Outside’ (1926), inspired by Newnham College. In Meade’s story, the rather straightforward moral universe disguises more subversive aspects. The protagonist’s aunt warns us, for example, that college girls have ‘“half-mannish ways”’, but the protagonist woos her friend in the college play whilst dressed as a man.14 Similarly, in Woolf’s story, a touch and an invitation trigger an intense emotional revelation, causing her signature narratorial fluidity to take on powerful romantic significance. Looking at these texts alongside Terry Castle’s work on tropes such as the lesbian ghost, I assess how these two writers use college rooms to prime readers to see such tropes, to imbue college spaces, through absences and qualifications, with the power to signify something beyond what is written. In the next section, I discuss two different college rooms in Q. D. Leavis’s review of Gaudy Night: the library and the mythical room Leavis sees behind Sayers’s purportedly indecent ‘‘social’ mind’, the ‘female smoking-room’.15 Even less has been written about women scholars’ opinions about women’s university fiction than about the fiction itself. While many learned women embraced their status in the popular imaginary as dangerous and degenerate, women scholars usually did not. According to Muriel Bradbrook, Somerville College in Oxford, where Gaudy Night is set, greeted Sayers’s novel with an ‘acid reception’.16 In this section I look at a famously sour review: Q. D. Leavis’s Scrutiny article, ‘The Case of Miss Dorothy Sayers’ (1937). I argue that Leavis’s criticism provides a reciprocal reading to the encoded references in women’s university fiction, which amounts to what Sedgwick calls paranoid reading. Using Sedgwick’s definition, I argue that Leavis employs a critical mode that is ‘anticipatory’, ‘reflexive and mimetic’, and creates a ‘strong theory’ which ‘places its faith in exposure’ (p. 130). In Gaudy Night, college rooms do not necessarily signify queerness per se, but more overt metaphors such as libraries and mirrors indicate secondary meanings. Because Leavis is preoccupied with the idea that such elements are shamefully inauthentic, learned literary conventions, I argue that she not only perpetuates the novel’s queer coding, but also illustrates how colleges fundamentally queer women by bringing to light their role as cultural instructors. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of ‘cultural capital’, I suggest that even though Leavis dislikes university fictions, colleges give early

14 L. T. Meade, A Sweet Girl Graduate (London: Cassell & Co., 1894), p. 190. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 15 Q. D. Leavis, ‘The Case of Miss Dorothy Sayers’, Scrutiny, 6 (December, 1937), 334-340 (p. 336). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 16 Bradbrook says: ‘I was at Somerville College, Oxford from 1935-6, and witnessed the acid reception of Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night.’ Muriel Bradbrook, ‘My Cambridge’, in Women and Literature 1779-1982: The Collected Papers of Muriel Bradbrook, Vol. 2. (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), p. 114. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text abbreviated as MC. 121 women scholars such as her room to unlearn some of their gendered assumptions. Following Woolf, who says in the 1930s that women must ‘kill’ the womanly ‘Angel’ who is both ‘in’ and ‘of the house’ to acquire ‘a mind of her own’, I ask whether the college, as the antithesis of the heterosexual house, is thus a place where women can indeed learn to criticise.17 The last section of this chapter attends to a broader idea of feminine collegiality, looking at the writings of Caroline Spurgeon, who studied at King’s College Ladies’ Department and taught at the University of London’s other women’s college at the time, Bedford College. The literary sources in the first sections of this chapter centre upon Cambridge University partly because it was home to influential figures such as I. A. Richards, and partly because critics of women’s education often saw Girton, the first women’s college in the U.K., as symbolic of women’s higher education in general. The central text in the next section focuses on a fictionalised version of Somerville, the first women’s college in Oxford, because its proximity to the university commuted prestige and, as a result, Sayers’s portrait incited strong reactions among its scholars. Oxbridge colleges, with their famous collegiate composition and cultural clout, feature heavily in university fiction, but it is important to note that many academic women forged their own intellectual communities, often out of necessity. In Spurgeon’s work, for example, she expresses fond memories of King’s and Bedford, but the intellectual communities she founded herself dominate. In the final section of this chapter, I therefore focus on these extramural collegiate communities: the International Federation of University Women (IFUW) and her home in Alciston, Sussex. Using Spurgeon’s 1922 speech on the IFUW’s aims, ‘University Women and World Friendship’, and life-writing on her personal relationships, I look at an idea of intellectual hospitality, or, the unconditional and seemingly effortless conditions that make people want to exchange ideas. Like the teaching and editing I discuss in chapter one, I argue here that intellectual hospitality is an intrinsically feminine affective environment, which, among other things, allows Spurgeon’s friends to develop ‘racing hearts’.18

17 Virginia Woolf, ‘Professions for Women’, in The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of The Years, ed. Mitchell Leaska (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), pp. xxx-xxxiii. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 18 Folger Shakespeare Library, Personal Papers of Caroline Spurgeon, MS Add.347, S.d. 76, Letter from Caroline Spurgeon to Lilian Clapham 18th January 1931. Further references to this collection are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 122

The Room is a Shrine

Dorothy Sayers’s novel Gaudy Night opens with an epigraph from John Donne:

The University is a Paradise. Rivers of Knowledge are there, Arts and Sciences flow from thence. Counsell Tables are Horti conclusi, (as is said in the Canticles) Gardens that are walled in, and they are Fontes signati, Wells that are sealed up; bottomless depths of unsearchable Counsels there (p. 5, emphasis in the original).

Like many writers throughout history, Donne describes the key benefit of college life to be seclusion. Familiar metaphors for the university, such as the ‘ivory tower’ or the ‘sacred grove’, characterise it as a clearly defined and closely guarded space.19 Around the turn of the twentieth century, university fiction illuminates the clandestine worlds that exist within college walls, but is also keen to uphold its perimeters. In Tivoli’s 1894 university novel Une Culotte, for example, the narrator calls the Cambridge college in which the novel is set a ‘church, prison, castle, library, shrine’ and directly asks the reader to ‘preserve the ancient hostelry against the hand of the Philistine’.20 In Gaudy Night, however, the picture is more moderate: the college is described as a more mundane ‘grey-walled paradise’ that offers only ‘narrow serenity’ (p. 22). Various theorists point out that university’s insularity is only beneficial for those inside, protecting its intellectual abundance and creating, as Donne says, ‘unsearchable counsels’. Jacques Derrida, for example, argues that college walls physically embody the elitism and exclusivity of the university system. Derrida claims that academia’s ‘principle of reason’ is a ‘principle of grounding, foundation or institution’ that ‘installs its empire only to the extent that the abyssal question of the being that is hiding within it remains hidden’.21 At the world-famous universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the collegiate system aids a key function of the university: to bring well-connected people in proximity with other well-connected people. The university creates communities that go on to insinuate all kinds of social governance, from law and party politics to culture and journalism. The college is, in other words, a marketplace for circulating what Bourdieu calls ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ capital.22 A character in Gaudy Night explains that for those looking to network at university the choice ‘“had to be Oxford […] or Cambridge, because of the opportunity of making the right kind

19 See Proctor p. 137; Steven Shapin, ‘The Ivory Tower: the history of a figure of speech and its cultural uses’, BJHS 45.1 (March 2012), 1-27; Mary McCarthy, The Groves of Academe (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1952). 20 Tivoli, Une Culotte; or, a New Woman: An Impossible Story of Modern Oxford (London: British Library historical print editions of original Digby & co, 1894), p. 1. 21 Jacques Derrida, Catherine Porter and Edward P. Morris, ‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils’, Diacritics, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Autumn, 1983), 2-20 (pp. 11, 10). 22 See Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’, in Readings in Economic Sociology, ed. by Nicole Woolsey Biggart (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 280-291 (p. 285). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 123 of friends”’ (pp. 152-3). My question here, though, is whether early women students experienced the advantages of collegiate seclusion. Was the college a space in which reason displaced material concerns? In this section I look at rooms in Cambridge’s two oldest women’s colleges, Girton and Newnham. Muriel Bradbrook explains that Girton, the first women’s college in the U.K., was originally situated in Hitchin, 26 miles from the centre of Cambridge (MC p. 118). When it moved to its permanent home a few years later, it was still two and a half miles from the other university buildings. Cambridge’s other women’s college, Newnham, was also set apart from the men’s residences, built on the other side of the river Cam. One of the most famous literary description of women’s colleges in the early twentieth century, Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own (1928), paints Girton’s seclusion in a rather negative light. After Woolf visited in 1928, she wrote in her diary that the college felt oppressive, saying that the corridors were ‘like vaults in some horrid high church cathedral’ and that the rooms reminded her of ‘convent cells’.23 But women who studied there tend to remember it differently. Bradbrook says, for example, that she is glad Girton was so isolated because it meant that the college had to be ‘exceptionally self- sufficient’ (TIF p. 114). She maintains that the college’s ‘closed society’ gave it pronounced ‘individuality’ and a ‘cosy and parochial’ atmosphere (TIF p. 112). Elsewhere, Bradbrook explains that college ‘families’ ‘stayed together throughout their college life, and gave each other essential support’ (MC p. 113). She does express bitterness, though, that the wider literary world often ignored them. E. M. Forster, for example, who was based down at King’s College in central Cambridge, apparently did not attempt to ‘penetrate the wall of gentility and social custom – or ever wished to, as it would appear’ (TIF p. 112). Being excluded from men’s societies and events appears to have been a double-edged sword, giving women freedom from patriarchal norms, but leaving them heavily reliant on each other for intellectual community. In women’s early-twentieth-century university novels, decorating one’s college room is an important episode. In Mrs George de Horne Vaizey’s story A College Girl (1911), for example, set at Newnham, the protagonist comments upon finding her room that her first impression is of

bareness and severity, an effect caused by the absence of picture or ornament of any kind… bad! but on the other hand, the room contained inexpensive luxuries in the shape of an old chest, a bureau, a standing bookcase, and a really comfortable wicker chair.24

23 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III, 1925–1930, ed. by Anne Oliver Bell (London: The Hogarth Press, 1980), pp. 200-1. 24 Anna Bogen explains in the introduction that Vaizey’s story was first serialised in Girls’ Own Paper in 1911, accompanied by photographs of Newnham, and then published as a complete novel in 1913 by the Religious Tracts 124

In L. T. Meade’s novel, A Sweet Girl Graduate, the protagonist’s financial constraints, which leave her unable to make her room homely, spurs the plot. Fellow students tell the protagonist, Priscilla, that college girls

“not only appreciate cleverness and studious ways, also obliging and sociable and friendly manners; and – and – pretty rooms with easy-chairs, and comfortable lounges, and the thousand and one things which give one a feeling of home” (p. 58).

Women students cannot simply invite friends round, they must actively host them. The emphasis on ‘pretty’ adornments and ‘obliging […] manners’ indicates that women students subject each other to gendered expectations. For Bradbrook, Meade’s characters are emblematic of genre and gender alike, having a ‘feminine preoccupation with the furnishing of their rooms’ (TIF p. 109). Priscilla cannot afford to furnish her room, however. She laments that it has a ‘cold, dreary, uninhabited feel’ and is the only one that remains “bare and unhomelike” (p. 28). When five pounds is stolen from her friend Maggie Oliphant, Priscilla’s poverty makes her a plausible culprit and another student frames her to pay off her own debts (incurred through buying clothes). Muriel Bradbrook describes ‘petty pilfering’ as one of various ‘crimes which carry forward a slender plot’ (TIF p. 109) in women’s university novels. It is true that money troubles and misunderstandings feature in Meade’s other university novel, The Girls of Merton College (1911). But their prominence also illustrates how gendered the college environment was for women students, most notably in their inability to outsource issues of domestic economy. In men’s novels, students are often treated like aristocrats, with personal servants termed ‘scouts’ (p. 62), or ‘menials’ (p. 63), as they are called in Une Culotte. While women’s colleges also have servants, students are responsible for many aspects of household management, such as furnishings, as a matter of social necessity. Indeed, women’s university fiction rarely depicts college according to Derrida’s notion of a starkly cerebral space or Bourdieu’s image of a private members’ club kind of community. They are in fact remarkably similar domestic spaces to the upper-middle-class homes from which many students had come. Priscilla’s room has further social significance. It is inhabited by the ghost of a previous occupant, Annabel Lee, who died of typhus fever—or, perhaps, a broken heart. Priscilla’s neighbour, Maggie, tells a friend early on in the story that the ‘“room is a shrine”’ (p. 17), but when Priscilla enquires about Annabel Maggie says she ‘“will never tell”’ (p. 36). Much later

Society. Mrs George de Horne Vaizey, Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Vol. 3: A College Girl ed. by Anna Bogen (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2015), pp. vii, 99. 125 another student, Annie, tells Priscilla that the college servants had ‘found Maggie and Annabel together; Annabel had fainted; and Maggie was in an awful state of misery— in quite an unnatural state’ (p. 94). She adds that ‘nothing was known, and nothing is known; but, certainly, the little whisper got into the air’ (p. 94). The end of the novel finally reveals the full story: Annabel had said to Maggie “I love you” and looked at her ‘with passionate longing’ (p. 237), but Maggie then explained that she wanted to marry their mutual friend, Hammond. Annabel ‘made an effort to say something, but words failed her’ (p. 238), then she fell unconscious and never recovered. The narrator adds that Annabel Lee ‘was an uncommon girl in every sense of the word’ (p. 232) and ‘an extraordinary girl’ (p. 233) with ‘a great deal of the exotic about her’ (p. 234). The synonyms for queer in the sense of abnormal abound. It is impossible to define the nature of Maggie and Annabel’s relationship, but I want to argue that it is coded queer in several ways: firstly, through intense and excessive emotion; secondly, through contradictory, empty, or incomplete statements; and, thirdly, through references to abnormality. To begin with the first, it is necessary to note that it was not uncommon for women to say they love each other in fiction in this period. But the narrator of A Sweet Girl Graduate emphasises that Maggie and Annabel’s affection was exceptional, before immediately suggesting it was platonic:

Maggie often said that she never knew what love meant until she met Annabel. The two girls were inseparable; their love for each other was compared to that of Jonathan and David of Bible story and of Orestes and Pylades of Greek legend (p. 234).

Yet Maggie also claims that she has tormented feelings that an engagement to Hammond will relieve. She tells Annabel: ‘“No more bad half-hours, no more struggles with myself. I can be very good now”’ (p. 238). Why would she wrestle with her conscience if their relationship fell within the bounds of acceptability? The climax of the novel is also tantalisingly queer. For the college performance of Tennyson’s poem, The Princess (from which the novel’s title is taken), Priscilla dresses as a man and plays the part of Maggie’s “lover” (p. 139). She is also wooing Maggie as a proxy for Hammond, who is in the audience, and as she takes to the stage in the final act she voices through free indirect speech that ‘she became once again not herself but he’ (p. 281). By sublimating herself into the role of Maggie’s lover, Priscilla yet again follows in Annabel’s footsteps. Gendered isolation thus allows college women to quite literally perform unconventional gender roles, as well as giving writers ways to explore such roles without raising too many suspicions. 126

We are also told that Annabel was both ‘old for her years’ yet ‘destined to a short life’ (p. 233). In Meade’s story, she only exists as a memory, caught in and symbolised by a room. Like the unnamed narrator in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), Priscilla shares her domestic space with the ghost of a woman adored by women.25 In The Apparitional Lesbian, Terry Castle tells us that Western popular culture often only presents women who love women in after-lives. Castle says that lesbians have, for instance,

a ‘“ghost effect”’ in the cinema world of modern life: elusive, vaporous, difficult to spot. […] The lesbian is never with us, it seems, but always somewhere else: in the shadows, in the margins, hidden from history, out of sight, out of mind, a wanderer in the dark, a lost soul, a tragic mistake, a pale denizen of the night.26

Whatever its nature, the intense emotional attachment between Maggie and Annabel disrupts the wider sociality of the college. Priscilla is unable to feel at home in her room because of its history as much as its bareness. Du Maurier’s narrator similarly says: ‘I felt like a guest in Manderley, my home, walking where she had trodden, resting where she had lain. I was like a guest, biding my time, waiting for the hostess to return’ (p. 154). The repetition of the word ‘guest’ echoes the word ghost, emphasising a symbiosis between the two women, the one no longer physically present still permeating their former space with intense symbolism. College rooms also engender queer readings in Woolf’s short story, ‘A Woman’s College From Outside’. Originally conceived as a passage in the 1922 novel Jacob’s Room, it was eventually published in 1926 as a short story in a collection compiled to raise funds for the Edinburgh University Women’s Union, called Atalanta’s Garland. Despite the title of the novel, Jacob’s college room holds far less emotional significance than those featured in ‘A Woman’s College From Outside’. In Jacob’s Room, for instance, the reader is told that, among his college friends, Jacob experiences ‘intimacy—the room was full of it, still, deep, like a pool’.27 But we are not privy to exactly what takes place:

The young men were now back in their rooms. Heaven knows what they were doing. […] Were they reading? Certainly there was a sense of concentration in the air. Behind

25 A maid, Clarice, tells the narrator that Mrs Danvers ‘simply adored Rebecca’. Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), p. 153. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 26 Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 2. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 27 Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008), p. 59. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 127

the grey walls sat so many young men, some undoubtedly reading, magazines, shilling shockers, no doubt (p. 54).

Reading is presented here as the presumed default activity for a male student; intellectual activity is so tangible the air is thick with it. But ‘A Woman’s College From Outside’, the emotion buoying the atmosphere is tumultuous and significant. A ‘vapour’ blows from women’s collective presence ‘into the open’ and the elderly ‘lay surrounded, lay supported’ by the young.28 Precisely because ‘none but women’s faces could meet her face’, the woman student can ‘unveil it blank, featureless, and gaze into rooms where at that hour, blank, featureless, eyelids white over eyes, ringless hands extended upon sheets, slept innumerable women’ (p. 71). Castle says that ‘withdrawing voluntarily from society in order to escape […] hostility’ could be described as a form of ‘self-ghosting’ (p. 7), but Woolf illustrates how blankness can be freeing for women. While to men vacant expressions might signal a lack of intelligence, here they are a sign that the smiling, obliging ‘Angel’ of ‘the house’ Woolf mentions elsewhere is indeed dead. At this time, segregated communities are the places in which women can be emotionally honest. ‘A Woman’s College From Outside’ is a typical Woolfian meander through a mind. Little happens in the story apart from some women students talking in one of their rooms. The drama of the story originates in the consciousness that the reader is privy to through free indirect speech, that of Angela Williams. There is little said explicitly, but the story contains hints of homosexual affection. Like Meade, Woolf veils sexuality in allusion and evasion. Most notably, the narrative immediately retracts the only mention of anything approaching sexual contact:

She had been talking, while the others played, to Alice Avery, about Bamborough Castle; the colour of the sands at evening; upon which Alice said she would write and settle the day, in August, and stooping, kissed her, at least touched her head with her hand, and Angela, positively unable to sit still, like one possessed of a wind-lashed sea in her heart, roamed up and down the room (the witness of such a scene) throwing her arms out to relieve this excitement, this astonishment at the incredible stooping of the miraculous tree with the golden fruit at its summit (pp. 73-4).

The kiss that does not actually happen gains significance through narrative qualification. Surely one would not imagine, and then revise, a purely platonic kiss? The gesture that does take place is still tender, but hardly likely to precipitate such psychic storms—unless it indicates something beyond itself. That beyond is the invitation Alice proffers immediately beforehand to visit during

28 Virginia Woolf, ‘A Woman’s College From Outside’, Atalanta’s Garland: Being the book of the Edinburgh University Women’s Union (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1926), p. 73. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 128 the summer holidays. Angela thus reads the touch as we have all been taught to read an invitation: as a promise about the future, as a sign that the offeror desires more. The tension is further heightened by the phrase ‘at least’, where Angela’s expectation bursts through the third person narrative with painful understatement. Justifying her mistake to herself and the reader, her hope suggests that we should invest in her sense of anticipation; that one day the touch might well be a kiss. Later, when Angela is in her own room, Woolf uses Edenic imagery to indicate that Angela has experienced a revelation. Her eyes are said to be irrevocably ‘unclosed’ to her ‘discovery’ (p. 74), but the specific content of the revelation is withheld. Indeed, Woolf presents it as intrinsically inexpressible: ‘a thing not to be touched, thought of, or spoken about’ (p. 74). Woolf’s indeterminate language here and qualifications during the scene with the kiss-that-is-not- a-kiss resemble Meade’s descriptions of Annabel and Maggie’s relationship, as well as Sedgwick’s definition of ‘queer’ as an ‘open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning’ (p. 8). Castle points out that an ‘anxiety too severe to allow for direct articulation’ (p. 8) was entirely plausible given society’s views on homosexuality at this time, explaining that in 1921, for example, the House of Lords decided

not to amend the antihomosexual Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 to include acts of “gross indecency” between women […] because they were afraid that by the very act of mentioning it, they might spread such unspeakable “filthiness” even further (p. 8).

I want to argue that in A Sweet Girl Graduate and ‘A Woman’s College From Outside’, we see attempts to navigate both a need to avoid explicit reference, but also gesture towards the joy that emotionally ambiguous communication might bring. In both texts, college rooms provide a reprieve from the wider world where it is safe to be uncertain about one’s feelings, to promise and to hope. Meade’s and Woolf’s characters can vocalise their affections excessively, indirectly, and even erroneously because only ‘the room’ bears benevolent ‘witness’ to the ‘scene’. The deliberately uncommunicative passages I quote here, also therefore defy the conventions of ‘close’ reading and citation, building accumulative effects with incomplete statements. Indeed, I reproduce Angela’s musings at length because they only convey meaning as a whole. Queerness is only legible in both the room and the story if one is looking for it, continually. In Meade’s and Woolf’s fictions, then, the college environment provides a physical and semantic cocoon for queer feminine intimacies.

129

Crypto-lesbian Affections

Gaudy Night codes queerness differently to A Sweet Girl Graduate or ‘A Woman’s College from Outside’. In Sayers’s novel, the college setting does not have the same sense of intimacy; strangers, including men, come and go, giving the impression that the college is part of the wider social world. Writing in the 1970s, Muriel Bradbrook laments that in later works of university fiction, women’s colleges appear to have lost their significatory potential. Discussing Rosamund Lehmann’s Dusty Answer, published eight years before Gaudy Night, Bradbrook says that the novel ‘shows the life of a woman’s college as a setting less for intellectual than for emotional growth – a place which is to be taken entirely for granted, simply as environment’ (TIF p. 115, my emphasis). She goes on to note that in Dusty Answer the students even describe the college, based on Lehmann’s alma mater, Girton, as a ‘detested building’ (TIF p. 115). Essentially, Bradbrook identifies her own obsolescence: students in Lehmann’s and Sayers’s time are no longer pioneers like women of earlier generations. The pragmatic necessity of forging consciously gender- segregated communities, as they do in A Sweet Girl Graduate, for example, have gone, so college is now a neutral backdrop for emotional development. Bradbrook is wary of this apparent social progress, though. She says, for example, that when a character in Dusty Answer brings a boy back to her room, this is ‘the full extent of her social emancipation; a hint of Lesbianism in the dark visitant from outside is kept muted’ (TIF pp. 114-5). By describing lesbianism as ‘kept’ quiet (in other words, restrained) immediately after framing a heterosexual encounter as a lacklustre example of ‘emancipation’, Bradbrook implies that true sexual liberation would involve homosexual encounters. When she describes another one of Lehmann’s character as having ‘crypto-Lesbian affections’ (TIF p. 114), she aptly expresses how queerness appears in more formal symbolism in Gaudy Night as well. The novel emblemises its central theme – how college learning alters women – in two main features: the library and the mirror. Both symbols operate more conventionally than how college rooms operate in A Sweet Girl Graduate or ‘A Woman’s College from Outside’, having a more obvious relationship to the theme (respectively, learning and sameness) that transcends the specific environment of women’s colleges. This is possibly because detective fiction often has a narrow semantic framework. Miriam Brody writes, for example, that ‘the code of detective fiction’ is characterised by not only rigid tropes and narrative structures, but induces the reader to 130 read as if they are detecting too.29 She says that the narrative climax hinges upon ‘[t]he apparent disorder of unauthored signs’ (the clues of the case) being ‘revealed as order after all’ when the ‘detective reads the signs accurately’ (p. 94). But the tropes of women’s university fiction are in transition when Sayers is writing. Susan J. Leonardi claims that ‘there are no lesbians in Gaudy Night’, but not because they don’t exist, but because they are not necessarily visible: ‘in the world of Gaudy Night, lesbianism loses its narratability, because in this context relations between women are no longer deviant’.30 As Bradbrook also points out, queer coding appears to be the victim of its own success; it is now so ubiquitous that the older tropes don’t communicate. When Lilian Faderman mentions that the ‘lesbian-teacher-feminist vampire remained a popular image in fiction for decades’ (p. 343), perhaps intending to emphasise the longevity of the image, she highlights the transience and localism of queer codes. Compared to the permanence of tropes such as the orphan who discovers he is some kind of nobility, for example, who appears in the stories of Henry Fielding right up to the Harry Potter series, decades are not necessarily a long time in narrative symbols. Queer coding’s defining semantic dexterity thus also makes its fragile. In Gaudy Night, queerness is denaturalised through two sets of tropes that are also brittle: detective fiction and women’s university fiction. Being unable to afford the subtle approach of earlier texts, in which women’s colleges operate as ambient symbolism, Sayers’s novel hides queerness in plain sight. The most important college room in Gaudy Night is the library. Catalysing the plot, Sayers’s story sees detective novelist Harriet Vane return to her undergraduate college, Shrewsbury (a fictionalised version of Somerville in Oxford), to attend the opening of the new library wing. When she arrives, the scholars beg her to stay on and investigate a series of poison pen attacks, which have escalated from offensive notes to burnt and stolen manuscripts. Just before the new library is due to open, it is defaced and ransacked. Later, a student working in the library has pages torn from her book whilst she is away from her desk. Harriet, struggling to piece together the clues, eventually calls in an actual detective, her on-off suitor, and Sayers’s usual protagonist, Lord Peter Wimsey. Using Harriet’s notes, he swiftly figures out that the perpetrator is one of the college servants, Annie. Her motivation is revenge: one of Shrewsbury’s scholars, Miss de Vine, ruined Annie’s scholar husband’s career by pointing out a falsehood in his

29 Miriam Brody, ‘The Haunting of “Gaudy Night”: Misreadings in a Work of Detective Fiction’, STYLE, Vol. 19, No. 1, The Modern Novel (Spring, 1985), 94-116 (p. 94). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 30 Susan J. Leonardi, Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists (London: Rutgers University Press, 1989), p. 93. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 131 work, leading him to commit suicide.31 A library also facilitates the original offence. Miss de Vine explains that she made her discovery because she had access to ‘a certain very obscure library in a foreign town’, in which she saw contradictory evidence to the male scholar’s argument (and which he later ‘stole’ to cover his error) (p. 328). For the perpetrator, libraries symbolise why women shouldn’t embark on formal education. Early on in the story, Annie tells Harriet that she thinks the new library is impressive, but that it is ‘“a great shame to keep up this big place just for women to study books in”’ because ‘“[b]ooks won't teach them to be good wives”’ (p. 116). As far as she is concerned, if women intend to fulfil their conventional gender role, libraries are quite literally a waste of space. I want to segue for a moment to explain the importance of libraries for women literary scholars in this period, as tools with which they can educate themselves, as I will take up this thread later when discussing Q. D. Leavis’s review of Gaudy Night. Edith Morley, for example, states in her memoir that she received a few years’ formal education in ‘feminine accomplishments’ such as foreign languages and art history, but that she mostly taught herself— through reading.32 Like Woolf, who says she had ‘the free run of a large and quite unexpurgated library’, Morley says: ‘I had the inestimable benefit of living at home in a house full of books, to any and all of which I had access’ (p. 5).33 Morley also mentions in her work on novelist Fanny Burney that Burney ‘received no regular teaching of any sort, but […] seems to have had the free run of her father’s extensive library (it contained only one novel—Amelia—however)’.34 In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf describes the library in a men’s college she visits as a place of ‘hospitality’, even if it is not open to her.35 Q. D. Leavis also sees the particular act of browsing libraries as an emblem of freedom. In an essay on Jane Austen, she mentions that in the novelist’s

31 Sayers’s women follow a long line of learned women who cause men death. In Tennyson’s 1847 poem ‘The Princess’, for example, the eponymous royal sets up a college for women with the inscription on the gate ‘Let no man enter in on pain of death’. In Max Beerbohm’s 1911 satirical novella, Zuleika Dobson, an amateur magician who visits her grandfather, the warden of a men’s college in Oxford, happens to have the power to make men fall in love with her. When she rejects male students’ advances, they commit suicide en masse. In addition, both the collection in which ‘A Woman’s College From Outside’ was published, Atalanta’s Garland, and the magazine in which L. T. Meade publishes essays on women’s colleges, Atalanta, refer to the mythological figure who says she will only marry on the condition that the suitor can beat her in a race. She demands that any who lose are killed, knowing that she can outrun them all. Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), p. 222; Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson: Or, An Oxford Love Story (London: Penguin, 1952), p. 5; ‘Atalanta’, Encyclopaedia Britannica. . Accessed 10 February 2020. 32 University of Reading, Special Collections, Edith Morley Collection, MS 938/7/4, ‘Looking Before and After: Reminiscences of a Working Life’, p. 5. Further references to this collection are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 33 Virginia Woolf, ‘Leslie Stephen’, Collected Essays Volume IV, ed. by Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1966- 7), p. 79. 34 Edith Morley, ‘Fanny Burney’, English Association, Pamphlet No. 60 (April 1925), p. 5. 35 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 9. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 132 later works ‘the master of the family had lost his majestic position and his family, no longer in awe or subjection, had taken to browsing among the books’.36 The library is such a potent emblem for these women because the reader can peruse the books at their own pace and make their own selection; it is a space that, like many women, offers without explicitly directing. Spurgeon and Morley found whilst they were studying at King’s, however, that intellectual indirection was a problem. In her memoir, Morley explains that because the Ladies’ Department didn’t have its own library, they used the British Museum’s reading rooms:

We caused a great deal of amusement to the authorities in the process, for to begin with we had no notion of selection, but attempted, when it was obviously impossible, as e.g. in the case of Shakespeare, to look at everything that had been written about a particular author or subject (p. 57).

Like the women that Hobhouse observes ‘flock[ing] to every lecture’, Morley and Spurgeon approach the library too eagerly. By getting lost among the vast stacks, they betray their novice status. The very opposite of the personal collections women of their class they grew up with, university libraries are impossible to browse, rendered inaccessible precisely because of their enormity. Much of their collection is stored out of reach and, as Woolf found, is only available to a select few. Spurgeon and Morley were thus also particularly ill-equipped to study literature at this time, because the discipline strongly valued selection and judgment. In a 1932 article defining ‘The Literary Mind’, for example, F. R. Leavis argues that ‘discriminating awareness’ is a key quality of the new literary scholar.37 Morley and Spurgeon did not learn to be selective, however, because they were taught to read like women. Indeed, academia reverses the intellectual goalposts for women of Morley and Spurgeon’s generation. In order to get to university, they have to read widely to compensate for a meagre formal education, but once they arrive there this style of reading is seen as naïve indiscrimination. In ‘Ways of Not Reading Gertrude Stein’, Natalia Cecire argues that women have often been seen as shallow readers:

The rapt female reader is thus imagined as an automaton, not so much reading as scanning, taking in words in enormous quantity without the will or critical acuity to “master” them. And in return, the literature destined for her “consumption” is equally automatic in quality: formulaic, repetitive, predictable.38

36 Q. D. Leavis, ‘Novelist of a Changing Society’, Q. D. Leavis: Collected Essays, Volume 1, ed. by G. S. Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 31-49 (p. 47). 37 F. R. Leavis, ‘The Literary Mind’, Scrutiny 1 (May 1932), 20-32 (p. 30). 38 Natalia Cecire, ‘Ways of Not Reading Gertrude Stein’, ELH, 82.1 (2015), 281-312 (p. 296). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 133

Like the women teachers and editors who I discuss in chapter one, literary academia feminises the female student-reader despite (or perhaps because of) her presence in an intellectual space. Even when there are plausible reasons why women study enthusiastically and extensively, their habits appear intrinsically feminine and bad to their critics. But some women scholars defied departmental trends. Elsie Duncan Jones, for example, Leavis’s contemporary at Girton, says that her tutor, Enid Welsford, generally ‘did not tell her pupils what to read’.39 Morley similarly mentions with pride that her mother was ‘an omnivorous reader’ (p. 5). This kind of passive modelling resembles how Q. D. Leavis encourages her husband to read George Eliot, but, in this case, women are expending their emotional labour on each other. By teaching other women to browse books freely, they are essentially teaching them to teach themselves. Browsing in libraries therefore symbolises women’s enforced and embraced autodidactism in this period. The second major symbol of queerness in Gaudy Night is the mirror. Not long after arriving at Shrewsbury, Harriet stands in the corridor musing over the portrait of the college’s fictional founder, the Countess of Shrewsbury, who we have previously been informed has a ‘queer, strong-featured face, with its ill-tempered mouth and sidelong, secretive glance’ (p. 8). Immediately after this, Harriet runs into the overtly man-hating tutor and at this point prime suspect, Miss Hillyard. Hillyard and Harriet discuss how men in academia will tolerate women, but not appoint them to senior roles, because, as Hillyard says, they ‘despise the critics’ (p. 54). After the exchange, Harriet returns to her room and ‘examine[s] herself in the mirror’ (p. 54), noticing her own ‘strong nose, a little too broad for beauty’ (p. 52). The narrative continues: ‘[t]here had been a look in the History Tutor’s eyes that she did not wish to discover in her own’ (p. 54). Marya McFadden sees ‘queer possibilities’ in the linguistic mirroring of Harriet’s ‘strong’ nose and the college founder’s ‘queer, strong-featured face’.40 McFadden argues that Harriet’s self-image threatens to reveal her ‘unconscious’ (p. 365) over-identification with both the tutor and the countess, who the story associates during this episode with ‘every alarming quality which a learned woman is popularly credited with developing’ (p. 52)—including, McFadden insinuates, homosexuality. By placing scenes of literal and metaphorical mirroring adjacent to one another, Gaudy Night makes an overt symbolic association between collegiate community and queerness.

39 Edmund Shils and Carmen Blacker, eds., Cambridge Women: Twelve Portraits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 210. 40 Marya McFadden ‘Queerness at Shrewsbury: Homoerotic Desire in Gaudy Night’, Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 46, Number 2 (Summer 2000), 355-378 (p. 371). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 134

Mirrors are also metaphors in Woolf and Meade’s work. In Jacob’s Room, they reveal women scholars’ intellectual solipsism. One of the few women scholars who make the final cut of the novel, ‘old Miss Umphelby’,

lets her fancy play upon the details of men’s meeting with women which have never got into print. Her lectures, therefore, are not half so well attended as those of [Classics scholar, Erasmus] Cowan, and the thing she might have said in elucidation of the text for ever left out. In short, face a teacher with the image of the taught and the mirror breaks (p. 53).

Contemporary readers of A Sweet Girl Graduate similarly find college women’s self-consciousness alarming. An anonymous reviewer for Quiver magazine says that it is extremely ‘disconcerting’ that women students ‘have full-sized mirrors in their bed-rooms’ and that the book’s frontispiece shows one of the characters ‘admiring her small but exquisitely proportioned figure in the looking-glass’.41 Yet again, the idea that women might learn something about themselves appears to terrify and dismay. But, in Gaudy Night, the mirror functions differently, because the word ‘queer’ appears directly alongside. Drawing on Faderman’s research, McFadden argues that Sayers hides queerness in lexical plain sight, too, because there is ‘ample evidence’ Dorothy Sayers knew that the word ‘queer’ connoted ‘same-sex object choice’ (p. 360). McFadden points out that this meaning is strongly implied in the scene in which Harriet speaks to Annie early on in the novel. Here, Annie claims that ‘“unmarried ladies living together […] isn't natural”’ (p. 115), then, Harriet recollects that ‘Annie's husband had been queer, or committed suicide, or something unfortunate’ (p. 116). In this list, the word ‘unfortunate’ passes judgment on the other scenarios in this sentence. The word ‘queer’ therefore refers a quality that might be deemed unfortunate, rather than as a descriptor like unfortunate, such as when it is used synonymously with the word ‘strange’. Gaudy Night thus invites the reader to suspect queerness not through coy allusion, as Woolf does, but through strikingly overt statements and metaphors.

An Academic Literary Taste

When Q. D. Leavis uses the term ‘queer’ in her review of Gaudy Night, she employs it, intriguingly, to deride literary abnormality. Leavis’s main qualm with Sayers’s work is that, in her opinion, Sayers is an ‘educated popular novelist’ (p. 335). In other words, she is a writer who

41 ‘Short Arrows’, Quiver, January 1892, 234-240 (p. 235). 135

displays knowingness about literature without any sensitiveness to it or any feeling for quality— i.e. she has an academic literary taste over and above having no general taste at all (there can hardly be any reader of Donne beside Miss Sayers who could wish to have his poetry associated with Lord Peter's feelings). Impressive literary excerpts, generally 17th century (a period far-off, whose prose ran to a pleasing quaintness and whose literature and thought are notoriously now in fashion) head each chapter. She—I should say Harriet Vane—proudly admits to having ‘the novelist’s habit of thinking of everything in terms of literary allusion.’ What a give-away! It is a habit that gets people like Harriet Vane firsts in English examinations no doubt, but no novelist with such a parasitic, stale, adulterated way of feeling and living could ever amount to anything (pp. 335-6).

Leavis goes on to lament that other academics cannot see Sayers’s writing for what it is, however. She says: Speculation naturally turns on how anyone can devote himself to the study and teaching of the humanities (we will let off the scientists in spite of their living in a place that alters all one's values) and yet not be able to place a Dorothy Sayers’ novel on inspection if it comes his way. Well it does seem queer, but such a lapse is not without precedent (p. 339).

She blames academic insularity for the oversight, saying that Sayers’s has made a reputation too easily in ‘these [i.e. collegiate] quarters’ because a ‘community cannot judge itself’ (p. 340). In her mind, a lack of literary judgement is strange. But why is using and appreciating ‘literary allusion’ such a shameful (open) secret? Leavis’s comment that ‘people like Harriet Vane get firsts in English examinations’ is rather extraordinary considering that, firstly, Harriet Vane is a not a person, she is a literary character, and, secondly, that Leavis was a highly successful examinee herself. Graduating top of her year in 1928 with special distinction, Leavis was the first woman to undertake a post- doctorate in English at Girton and became one of the most famous women literary academics of her generation. Why does Leavis, then, a literary academic herself, take umbrage with an ‘academic taste’ in literature? Following Sedgwick’s definition, I want to argue that Leavis’s review is a typically paranoid reading. Her preoccupation with women’s literary learning and self- consciousness replicates the ‘reflexive and mimetic’ elements in Sayers’s novel. By announcing that literary ‘allusion’ is a ‘give-away’, Leavis ties together these elements into an ‘anticipatory’ and ‘strong theory’ which ‘places its faith in exposure’. One could therefore argue that Leavis’s analysis is also queer, because, in order to critique Sayers’s queer coding, she too must be literate in it. 136

The idea that learning corrupts is of course as old as the Garden of Eden, as ‘A Woman’s College From Outside’ reminds us, but, for Leavis, women’s colleges nurture two new foes: sociable learning and formal literary education. Leavis locates the first problem in a fictive college room: the female smoking-room. Appalled by the ‘determined sociality’ of Sayers’s college women, she says that the novelist’s

deliberate indecency […] is only the emanation of a 'social' mind wanting to raise a snigger; you sense behind it a sort of female smoking-room (see the girlish dedication to Busman's Honeymoon) convinced that this is to be emancipated (p. 336).

Like Annie, Leavis sees women’s colleges as naïve and claustrophobic intellectual communities that induce dangerous unconventionality in women. When she goes on to doubt whether the older generation of college women – the pioneer’s generation – would be interested in Harriet’s ‘lucubrations’ (p. 339), or, nocturnal study, Leavis again associates unstructured extracurricular learning with secrecy and deviance. Victoria Stewart points out that Leavis also criticises male smoking-rooms, citing a 1939 article on ‘The Background to Twentieth Century Letters’. In Stewart’s opinion, both kinds of ‘single-sex and single-class education’ are equally on trial in Leavis’s work, because men’s coteries have the power to form ‘a more traditional, more deeply ingrained, and probably more damaging facet of English social life than Sayers’s ‘female smoking- room’’.42 I want to argue, however, that Leavis’s objections have a different quality to them. Old boys’ clubs may warrant criticism because they have social power, but women’s communities warrant disgust because they threaten a respectable version of femininity. When Leavis says that ‘determined sociality’ incites ‘indecency’, she implies that, like Annie, she believes that the only acceptable living arrangement for women is in a heterosexual marriage. It is worth exploring Sayers’s ‘girlish dedication’ in more detail. The dedication features in Sayer’s next novel, Busman’s Honeymoon (1937), and suggests that the novelist benefitted from her own ‘female smoking-room’. Here Sayers thanks her college friends, ‘Muriel [St Clare Byrne], Helen [Simpson] and [Marjorie] Bar[ber]’ for showing an ‘extreme of womanly patience’ when they ‘listened’ to drafts of the novel.43 The women had been part of a writers’ circle Sayers’s had founded at Oxford, suitably called the Mutual Admiration Society.44 Sayers adds in

42 Leavis argues that Sir Edward Marsh, Logan Pearsall Smith, Cyril Connolly and Louis MacNeice form a literary coterie. Q. D. Leavis, ‘The Background to Twentieth Century Letters’, Scrutiny VIII.1 (1939), p. 73, quoted in Victoria Stewart, ‘Women and Education under Scrutiny’, Literature & History third series, 13.2 (Autumn 2004), 67-85 (p. 77). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 43 Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman’s Honeymoon: A Love Story with Detective Interruptions (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1972), p. 7. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 44 See Mo Moulton, The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women (London: Hachette UK, 2019). 137 her dedication that her amateur editorial team ‘wantonly sacrificed on the altar of that friendship of which the female sex is said to be incapable’ (p. 7). Gesturing towards the stereotype of women competing with each other for husbands, Sayers claims that their college society transcended such base instincts in the name of intellectual assistance. The same occurs in Gaudy Night. When the manuscript is stolen, Miss Hillyard had been helping Miss Lydgate with her book by ‘verifying certain historical allusions’ (p. 80). Both the real and fictional women in Sayers’s world defy conventional gender roles and, paradoxically, are critical to be kind. Furthermore, by pointing to the gender stereotypes they defy, she implies that intellectual companionship nurtures women’s political consciousness and, vice versa, that heightened consciousness forges stronger intellectual communities. Where Leavis sees only nepotism and solipsism, Sayers sees collegiality. Turning to Leavis’s second area of concern, we see that she does not object to conspicuous literary learning per se. In the passage I quote earlier, she cites ‘knowingness’, academically fashionable ‘literary excerpts’, ‘allusion’, and success in ‘examinations’ as ‘parasitic’ and ‘stale’. In other words, Leavis detests precisely the same traits as Hobhouse: undertaking a formal literary education wholeheartedly, enthusiastically, without discrimination. Leavis’s complaint about literary excerpts is a useful example. She says that she dislikes Sayers’s quotations, for instance, but a novelist she consistently admires, George Eliot, also opens every chapter of Middlemarch with a literary epigraph. So how is Sayers’s work different? I want to suggest that the distinction revolves around different kinds of learning that the library epitomises. In her 1967 introduction to another Eliot novel, Silas Marner, Leavis says that the writer’s ‘boarding school’ was a ‘blight of evangelism’ which was later rectified through reading. 45 Leavis continues, ‘Scott first unsettling her orthodoxy and Shakespeare becoming the book of books’ (p. 227). Here she presents reading as having precisely the opposite function of study, as she characterises it. The former engages and provokes; the latter subdues and indoctrinates. In her account, Eliot re-educates herself with books and, unlike Sayers, she has no tutors or syllabuses to guide her. Leavis would rather women learned in the library, alone, not the smoking-room, in company. Leavis appears to have a double standard for literary ‘allusion’, too. Sayers’s fictional college, ‘Shrewsbury’, is surely a nod to Shakespeare’s outspoken woman and the name Miss ‘de Vine’ intended to convey charm. As when Sayers uses the word ‘queer’ alongside a mention of mirrors, this form of coding asks the reader to both see and not see what the narrative obviously

45 Q. D. Leavis, ‘Introduction’, in George Eliot, Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe, ed. by David Carroll (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 227. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 138 states. But many famous novelists use this technique to imply character traits through seeming coincidentally appropriate names, including Henry Fielding, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens, to name only a few. What Leavis appears to dislike in Sayers’s work is the ease with which she invokes literary ancestors and therefore implies that anyone could situate themself into literary tradition. Yet Leavis herself uses literary allusion. At the very beginning of her review Leavis claims that the new breed of ‘educated popular novelist’ requires a medical intervention:

Like the Ouidas and Marie Corellis and Baron Corvos of the past they are really subjects for other kinds of specialist than the literary critic, but unlike those writers these are to some extent undoubtedly conscious of what they are doing (and so are able to practise more adroitly on their readers) (p. 334).

For someone aggrieved at allusion, Leavis provides surprisingly little information about these writers. Perhaps because they are all popular writers of the period, she assumed her audience would know them. In other words, they don’t need a literary education to be identified. But her specific grouping is only comprehensible if the reader already knows what qualities they share, which are notably at the intersection of aesthetic and sexual distastefulness. Some of the writers she mentions were known for personal scandals, but all for writing tawdry, sensational fiction.46 As when Leavis describes academics’ love of Sayers as ‘queer’ and a ‘lapse’, she conflates sexual and literary deviance. The pathology that Leavis diagnoses in Sayers is, essentially, being middlebrow. Leavis believes that Sayers’s novels only ‘incidentally affect to deal in large issues and general problems’ (p. 335) and that Gaudy Night attempts to ‘answer the question whether academic life produces abnormality in women’ (p. 335, my emphasis). Leavis’s concern with conventionality, coupled with pretensions of greater complexity, accords with the Oxford English Dictionary definition of “middlebrow” as a person who is ‘of average or limited cultural interests (sometimes with the implication of pretensions to more than this)’ or an artistic work that is ‘of limited intellectual or cultural value […] typically as a result of not deviating from convention’.47 I want to argue, however, that Leavis’s reading is more conventional than Sayers’s novel. While the end of the

46 On Marie Corelli, see Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 130-31. On Baron Corvo, see David Hilliard, ‘UnEnglish and UnManly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality’, Victorian Studies, 25.2 (Winter 1982), 181-210 (p. 199). For Ouida, see Natalie Schroeder and Shari Hodges Holt, eds., Ouida the Phenomenon: Evolving Social, Political, and Gender Concerns in Her Fiction (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press; London: Eurospan, 2008). 47 “middlebrow”, adj., Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) [accessed 09/09/2018]. 139 novel does address the normalcy of Shrewsbury’s women, it hardly gives a straightforward conclusion. After the culprit is revealed, the narrative tells us that the women of Shrewsbury ‘were all normal again. They had never been anything else. Now that the distorting-glass of suspicion was removed, they were kindly, intelligent human beings’ (p. 433). But both these conditions cannot be true; something cannot return to normalcy if it never have deviated from it in the first place. Just as the kiss in ‘A Woman’s College From Outside’ turns out to be a touch, this statement cannot be taken at its word. If Gaudy Night does pose a ‘question’, it certainly does not provide an ‘answer’. McFadden points out that Harriet Vane only just manages to answer the other question she is posed in the novel: whether she will marry Lord Peter Wimsey. Leavis sees Harriet’s acceptance right at the end of the novel as a rather conservative conclusion, saying that the novel’s unconventionality is mere ‘shadowboxing’ because in the end the reader is ‘let off with a reassurance that everything is really all right and appearances are what really matter’ (p. 336). While narrative conclusions can, of course, reframe the significance of everything that has gone before them, Sayers’s does not precisely because she is writing within the confines of two relatively rigid genres: detective fiction and university fiction. As McFadden points out, it is clearly unconventional to keep one’s recurring detective, Wimsey, completely absent for 300 of the novel’s 400 pages, and place Harriet as the protagonist instead. Indeed, the first edition of Gaudy Night bore the wry subtitle: ‘a novel not without detection’.48 Victoria Stewart also notes that Wimsey’s solution is not necessarily a resolution, because, although he exposes one particular culprit, he does not solve the broader societal problem, ‘hatred of academic women’ (p. 76). Stewart claims that Harriet’s speculations, ‘based on more nebulous notions about female sexuality’, come far closer to the political issues underpinning Annie’s mentality. As such, Stewart concludes that ‘[w]hat Leavis sees as pseudo-academic window-dressing is therefore integral to the novel’s progress’ (p. 76). I would go further. By making Harriet’s and Wimsey’s different solutions a plot device, Sayers demonstrates an awareness of the thing Leavis claims she cannot see: the novelist’s limitations as a social critic. By making her own fictional novelist collect the requisite evidence so that the detective can solve the case, Sayers suggests that the novelist – and the woman – is the more astute observer and the more nuanced critic. Thus, by pinning the novel as a simple question and an answer, Leavis aligns herself with the ‘specialist’ and the ‘psychologist’ who jump to conclusions where there are only ambiguities. It is not Sayers’s novel that is glib, but Leavis’s reading of it.

48 Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night: A Novel Not Without Detection (London: Victor Gollancz, 1935). 140

The other value underpinning Leavis’s criteria is authenticity. Words like ‘parasitic’ and ‘stale’ suggest that there is such a thing as real and false literary sensibility and that the former is intangible by definition, held in the body, in ‘living’ and ‘feeling’. As far as Leavis is concerned, if Sayers ever did possess true literary feeling, academia has distorted it into mere simulacra. Bradbrook also identifies a lack of authenticity as a primary issue, warning her readers: ‘never trust the image, trust the live encounter’ (p. 117). She calls L. T. Meade’s depictions of Girton, for example, an ‘outsider’s image’ (p. 106) because, even though Meade had visited in 1893 and written several factual pieces on women’s colleges, she never studied there.49 But both Bradbrook and Leavis dislike portraits by former graduates, too. Bradbrook’s disapproval of Dusty Answer and Leavis’s dissatisfaction with Gaudy Night suggests that authenticity is a gatekeeping value, a way of rejecting experiences that don’t fit closely with their own. Leavis says, for example, that whereas the younger scholars in Sayers’s female smoking-room sound superficial, ‘the conversation of the oldest generation of women dons sounds convincing’ because it has an unfriendly ‘acid note’ (pp. 338-9). Like Bradbrook, she appears to regret that socialising is now less fraught, because it indicates that college life has become normal for women. Now that there are more portrayals of women’s colleges, the experiences of these pioneers seem less politically significant and have less narrative significatory potential. Bradbrook’s reflections also highlight that Leavis’s criticisms of academia are somewhat disingenuous. In a note concerning Woolf’s 1928 visit, for which both women were present, Bradbrook says that:

The impression [Woolf] gave [illegible – possibly ‘forward’] was that she was looking at Girton from the angle of King’s. […] Queenie Leavis was to be notable in Cambridge—but not at King’s! We admired Mrs Woolf but we didn’t feel attached (my emphasis).50

Even if Leavis rejects the college’s ‘closed society’, it nevertheless benefits her, because it grants her the star student status she could never achieve in the wider academic community.51 Leavis adds towards the end of the article that it would be better

49 See L. T. Meade, ‘Girton College’, Atalanta Vol. 7 (1893-4), 325-31; L. T. Meade, ‘Newnham College’, Atalanta Vol. 7 (1893-4), 525-29. 50 Girton College Archive, GCRF 8/4/5, ‘Virginia Woolf: Collected File’ [Documents relating to Virginia Woolf’s visit to Girton 1928], Muriel Bradbrook, note dated 8 June 1989. Leavis also takes issue with Woolf’s representation of women’s colleges in a review of Woolf’s essay on women in the professions, Three Guineas, claiming that Woolf’s analysis is ‘insulated by class’, invoking highly gendered distinctions between amateur and professional study with phrases such as ‘boudoir scholarship’ and a ‘feminine conception of congenial study’. Q. D. Leavis, ‘Caterpillars of the Commonwealth, Unite!’, Scrutiny, 7, No. 2 (Sept., 1938), 203-214 (pp. 203, 208, 209). 51 William A. Dolid points out that in 1890, for example, Philippa Fawcett gained the top mark in Mathematics, but was declared ‘above the Senior Wrangler’ because women were not allowed to be the ‘Senior Wrangler’. See William A. Dolid, ‘Vivie Warren and the Tripos’, The Shaw Review, Vol. 23, No. 2 (1980), 52-56 (p. 55). 141

if the critical winds of the outside world could be let blow through these grimy edifices, and perhaps they would if the facts ever leaked out and left a loophole for criticism to get in by (p. 339).

She appears to not see that the wider world’s criticism was likely to be far harsher than criticism from within. Yet, as Sayers had shown in her personal life, collegiate communities made intellectual exchange more possible, for her at least. When Leavis seems to suggest that positive internal bias is far worse than external negative bias, because that internal bias emerges from an unnatural social group, her stance again reflects that of Sayers’s culprit, Annie. After Wimsey has revealed her crimes, he points out that she sought revenge because there is ‘not a woman in this Common Room, married or single, who would be ready to place personal loyalties above professional honour’ (p. 420). For Annie and Leavis, women’s colleges disrupt the bonds of spousal loyalty, indeed killing the angel of the house Woolf describes. Perhaps because they feel on the outside, they see these new bonds as a kind of reverse sexism. Sayers’s work suggests, however, that colleges gave women protection from men’s stereotyped criticism, so that they could develop their own critical voices, acid or otherwise. It is noteworthy that Leavis performs what she thinks she finds: intensely attentive diagnoses, literary allusion and self-consciousness, generic superficiality and coded referencing. What does this tell us about early literary studies, then? Is it a coincidence that there is a shared discourse in descriptions of middlebrow literature and college women in the early twentieth century? To put the question another way: if, as Sedgwick quotes, paranoia ‘reflects the repression of same-sex desire’ (p. 126) in patriarchal heteronormative society, does this gendered discourse indicate literary academia’s prejudices? I believe that, in her determination to diagnose the ills of academic women, Leavis becomes the hermeneutic sleuth that Sayers resists writing. Sedgwick says, quoting Sylvan Tompkins, that while paranoid reading exists in a ‘“constant state of alert for possibilities”’ this ultimately means that, ‘[l]ike any highly organized effort at detection, as little as possible is left to chance”’ (p. 135). In a bleak, totalising prognosis, Leavis similarly interprets Sayers’s stylistic choices as evidence that writers and critics who studied literature at university are currently decimating the whole of literary culture. She employs the same hermeneutic mode in Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), as I explore in chapter two, and which Ben Knights traces back to I. A. Richards, arguing that in Practical Criticism Richards operates ‘in psychologist vein’, making ‘confident pronouncements upon the character of other people’s minds’ (pp. 39-40). But Leavis’s critique of Gaudy Night evokes a different emotional register. Whereas Richards finds a lack of literary discernment humorous, saying in 142 correspondence that he is ‘nearly ill with laughter’ at his students’ opinions, Leavis finds it shameful.52 When she states that Sayers’s allusions are a ‘give-away!’, she implies that poor taste is an embarrassing faux pas; in other words, a transgression of the social contract. Feeling duty bound to expose the deception, she therefore formulates what Sedgwick calls a ‘strong theory’; ‘a theory of negative affects’ that ‘places its faith in exposure’ (p. 130). I believe that Leavis reads Gaudy Night in a paranoid manner because she is highly literate in, and strongly invests in, social codes. Because she can astutely interpret Sayers’s, she can therefore see that they threaten her own. When Leavis is writing, a literary education queers both women in both senses of the word: it makes them appear abnormal and, as such, fundamentally alters what assets they bring to the sexual, marital economy. In ‘The Forms of Capital’, Bourdieu states that ‘the scholastic yield from educational action depends on the cultural capital previously invested by the family’ through ‘diffuse, continuous transmission’ which ‘escapes observation and control’ (p. 288). Immaterial forms of capital like education, social networks, and cultural knowledge function as covert stores for financial capital and signal class status to others. Bourdieu explains, though, that

[e]ducational qualifications never function perfectly as currency. They are never entirely separable from their holders: their value rises in proportion to the value of their bearer, especially in the least rigid areas of the social structure (p. 290).

When women enter the professions, then, the social structure, and the ‘process of embodiment, incorporation’ (p. 283) by which an individual attains capital, is shaken. Interestingly, Bourdieu does not clarify who imparts cultural capital through such diffuse transmission. Kate Flint mentions, though, that, in infancy and early childhood, cultural instruction falls mostly to ‘governesses, mothers, and schoolteachers’ (p. 193)—in other words, to women. Thus, feminine modes of pedagogy, such as intimacy and encouragement, browsing libraries and reading without direction, are essential for the covert operation of cultural inheritance. Women scholars, who earn wages and become accredited to teach culture, threaten this system. Academic women at this time are therefore queer in another sense: they are cut off from their own cultural inheritance, which doesn’t count in the literary classroom, but cannot quite access the new masculine modes of criticism either. Because literary knowledge is no longer solely an invisible familial inheritance or a feminine accomplishment, but an overt, measurable, professionalised set of skills, women such as Leavis can no longer be the obsequious angel of the

52 I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement, ed. by John Constable (London: Routledge, 2001), p. ix. 143 house. The new literary academic is now professionally qualified to criticise, yet the university still sees her as an amateur. The problem with Leavis’s criticism, then, is not that it is diagnostic, but that it attributes the problem to the wrong social agent. Gaudy Night is not bad literature because it emerges from an academic environment; it is literature that indicates how successfully academic environments impart cultural capital, how easily they disseminate ideas of good and bad taste. While, as Bourdieu says, ‘the capital of the autodidact […] may be called into question at any time’ (p. 285), Sayers, by making her cultural capital obvious, demonstrates that formal education is equally mutable. So-called ‘academic’ literature such as Gaudy Night implies that literary taste was indeed academic, in the sense of being learned, all along.

An Exceptionally Valuable Center of Hospitality

In the final section of this chapter, I want to look at queer coding in extramural collegiate communities. Continuing the discussions on colleges as affective environments and libraries as passive teachers, I want to explore the notion of intellectual hospitality, or, what conditions are necessary to make people want to think together. In this section, I discuss the history of how Caroline Spurgeon founded the IFUW, her writing on its work, and her domestic situation. Her circumstances are an interesting case study in how early-twentieth-century women scholars adapted to their exclusion from ancillary aspects of university life, such as its social networks. Spurgeon studied at King’s College Ladies’ Department then went to work at Bedford College (now Royal Holloway), which Spurgeon’s long-term partner, Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve, describes in her memoir as ‘an exceptionally valuable center of hospitality’.53 Yet Spurgeon was compelled to set up two intellectual communities of her own: the IFUW and her home at Alciston in Sussex. Studying Spurgeon’s writing is a way of asking the question: what do women achieve when they create their own queer academic communities? Spurgeon’s key aim for the Federation was to foster intellectual hospitality. In her archive at Royal Holloway, correspondence shows that the idea for the IFUW originated from conversations with the Duchess of Marlborough in 1918. The Duchess invited Spurgeon to set up some ‘Scholarships for Women of the Empire and the United States of America’ and ‘An Associated Board for the promotion of Imperial-American interchange for Women University

53 Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve, Many a Good Crusade (New York: Macmillan, 1954), p. 132. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 144

Students’.54 When Spurgeon travelled to America, though, and met Gildersleeve (the Dean of Colombia University’s women’s college, Barnard College), she began to conceive of the project differently. As Spurgeon explains in a 1923 talk on ‘University Women and World Friendship’, the Foundation is ‘International’ and aims to unite ‘“understanding minds”’ in ‘civilized countries’ with ‘similarly educated people in other lands’ and is still active today under the name Graduate Women International.55 While Spurgeon’s diction betrays a colonial notion of civilisation, she does exchange the word ‘Imperial’ from the Duchess’s original brief for ‘International’ and expands the project beyond Anglophone regions. In her rather ambitiously titled essay, Spurgeon actually describes the organisation in modest terms. She calls the founding members a ‘small cross section of humanity’ and a ‘little group of women of some seventeen different nations’ (p. 1), referring to the second IFUW conference in Paris. She uses informal terms to describe the group’s socialising, says that they enjoy ‘chatting in the pleasant rooms, or taking coffee together’ (p. 4), but not because she intends to diminish the value of these activities.56 When Spurgeon is on a fact-finding mission in October 1918 for the British government about American women’s colleges, she describes her current institution, Bedford College, in similarly diminished terms. She writes to Bedford’s Principle, Meta Tuke, saying: ‘I want you & our very own little humble college so achingly badly’ (S.d.76). Understanding that academic communities are professional networks too, Spurgeon desires to undermine the exclusivity and formalities of an old boys’ club. In her essay, she also declares that

only by the knowledge which comes of informal meetings and straightforward and sincere discussion in small groups, only in short by personal relations, by the contact of individual with individual and of mind with mind, can divers national point of view be understood, […] without which the machinery of the League of Nations is but an empty name (p. 2).

The IFUW clubhouse built in London, which Spurgeon led the fundraising campaign for, also tried to offer capacious community. The BFUW Newsheet explains the members ‘adopted’

54 Royal Holloway, University of London, RHC AR/130/1 Archives, Personal Papers of Caroline Spurgeon, RHC PP7/6/1/1; PP7/6/1/2. 55 Caroline Spurgeon, ‘University Women and World Friendship’, Journal of American Association of University Women, March 1923, 1-14 (p. 3). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 56 The motto of the British Federation for University Women is ‘amicitiae perficiamus artem’: perfect the art of friendship. The BFUW was formed in 1905 and Spurgeon received its inaugural research fellowship for £150. See Carol Dyhouse, ‘The British federation of university women and the status of women in universities, 1907-1939’, Women's History Review, 4:4 (1995), 465-485. 145 foreign students, for instance, and the Federation’s magazine provides professional advice.57 Spurgeon’s collegiate vision prioritises friendship, close community, and broad solidarity; for her, creating affective environments is a necessity.58 Spurgeon also created another college beyond the college. For around a decade, until Spurgeon’s death in 1942, she and Gildersleeve cohabited on and off in a highly unconventional arrangement. Gildersleeve writes in her memoir that ‘women, single or widowed, should not live alone’ (p. 205)—words she put into practice with Spurgeon, who would spend half the year with her in America and half the year at the Old Postman’s Cottage in Alciston, Sussex, with Gildersleeve and her long-time companion, Lilian Clapham. Through their work with the IFUW, the cottage also became an international meeting place for women academics. The guest book for the Old Postman’s Cottage shows that regular visitors included Meta Tuke and Theodora Bosanquet, the IFUW secretary and Henry James’s former scribe, and that Edith Morley visited between 6-10th April 1935.59 Spurgeon was eager to document women’s gatherings, even in absentia. When she visits America in 1931, for example, she writes on January 4th to Clapham, who is currently at her London residence, saying that she wished Clapham had sent the ‘whole House List’ so that Spurgeon can see how many visitors she has had (S.d.76). As a record, the guest book or House List is curiously secretive, however. Like the invitation in ‘A Woman’s College from Outside’, its content is obscure. Like calling cards or invitations, the guest book symbolises sociality, but whereas the former two documents signify a desire for company, the guest book registers a meeting after the fact, signifying that it was mutually agreed. There is another ambiguous invitation in Spurgeon’s archive at Royal Holloway. Gildersleeve, Spurgeon, and Clapham were all highly active in the local Sussex community in Sussex, raising money for a village hall to be built and enlisting local celebrity, John Maynard Keynes, to open it in 1935.60 Gildersleeve says in her memoir that her ‘international experience’ and ‘sensitivity to the ideals and feelings of foreign peoples’ was developed not by her experiences with the IFUW, but by ‘living naturally and intimately in a small community of a nation other

57 The first issue of the British Federation of University Women News Sheet in April 1930 advertised exchanges of one kind of feminine labour for another: ‘free board and lodging, in return for English conversation, to a musician, painter or student.’ Issue No.3 in February 1931 discusses the ‘Hospitality Sub-Committee’. British Federation of University Women News Sheet, No. 1 (April 1930), p. 12; British Federation of University Women News Sheet, No.3 (February 1931), p. 2. 58 In her memoir, Edith Morley similar states that ‘a College implies something more than learning and teaching’ (p. 41). 59 See East Sussex, Brighton and Hove Record Office, AMS 6516/7, Documents relating to Old Postman’s Cottage, Alciston, ‘Visitors’ book and photograph album’, c. 1880-1936. 60 ‘Selmeston Village Hall’ [accessed 21/09/2018]. 146 than [her] own’ (p. 188).61 While Spurgeon found understanding through international community, Gildersleeve found it in a provincial locality. But a postcard dated 3 April 1936, from Sir Robert Witt of The Old Clergy House in the nearby village of Alfriston, suggests that the women were not always welcoming, however. 62 The postcard reads:

Dear Professor Spurgeon, I am not sure whether you & Miss Gildersleeve are [illegible, possibly ‘requesting’] one to tea or not. Perhaps you would kindly let my chauffeur know. […]63

One-sided communication is a common feature of the archive, of course, but it is interesting that Spurgeon kept this postcard, which is not from someone she knew well and does not convey important information. A strange epistolary artefact, it records communicative failure after the fact. Spurgeon was clearly a proficient host, saying in her essay that hospitality must be an intangible, unconditional, and anticipatory affect. She claims, for example, that the ‘“atmospheric” side of the Federation’ is ‘the most difficult to describe and the more important’ (p. 7) and adds that she wants to establish ‘local hospitality committees’ for each IFUW club house ‘so that a University woman traveling in any country shall be at once welcomed’ (p. 10). In an article on Woolf’s domestic records, Sara Crangle argues that ‘[t]o welcome a guest properly, that welcome must be unconditional’.64 If Witt is unable to work out if he is invited, then, effectively, he is not; an ambiguous invitation is not an invitation at all. Furthermore, where a guest book records socialising afterwards, his letter is a future request, and therefore constitutes a self-invitation, which is, again, not an invitation at all. Crangle also cites Jacques Derrida, who

61 The phrase ‘living naturally’ is perhaps a nod to the fact that some might have seen their arrangement as ‘unnatural’, which has historically meant homosexual. 62 Muriel Bradbrook writes about another isolated queer domestic environment and the role of invitations in her 1949 article ‘Living the Gothic Pastoral Romance: The Ladies of Llangollen’. Bradbrook discusses the domestic and intellectual lives of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, who cohabited in a small village in North Wales from 1791 until Lady Eleanor’s death in 1829. Like Spurgeon, the wider literary sphere desexualises them: one of their visitors, Prince Pückler-Muskau, called them ‘the two most celebrated virgins in Europe’. Darryl Jones mentions that literary figure Hester Thrale wrote after a visit to Llangolen in 1795 that ‘“‘tis now common to suspect Impossibilities (such as I think ‘em) whenever two Ladies live too much together”’. As they increasingly became a spectacle for the outside world, Bradbrook explains that they became more closeted: when visitors ‘had not brought an introduction, or sent up their cards with compliments and a polite request to see the place’ Eleanor would angrily turn them away. See Muriel Bradbrook, ‘Living the Gothic Pastoral Romance: The Ladies of Llangollen’, in Women and Literature, 1779-1982: The Collected Papers of Muriel Bradbrook, Vol. 2. (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), pp. 1-27 (pp. 3, 10); Darryl Jones, ‘Frekes, Monsters and the Ladies: Attitudes to Female Sexuality in the 1790s’, Literature & History, 3rd series, 4/2 (1995), 1-24 (p. 13). 63 Royal Holloway, University of London, RHC AR/130/1 Archives, Personal Papers of Caroline Spurgeon, PP7/1/3/11, ‘Postcard from Sir Robert Witt, The Old Clergy House, Alfriston, Sussex, 3 April 1936’. 64 Sara Crangle, ‘Out of the Archive: Woolfian Domestic Economies’, Modernism/modernity, Vol. 23, Number 1 (January 2016), 141-176 (p. 168). 147 argues that if one “practice[s] hospitality ‘out of duty’ . . . this hospitality of paying up is no longer an absolute hospitality, is no longer graciously offered beyond debt and economy.”65 When Witt asks if Spurgeon and Gildersleeve are offering hospitality, he thus breaks its unspoken agreement, because, even if Spurgeon and Gildersleeve did agree to host him, he will never know if they felt obliged. If their ambiguity is another form of queer coding, then the underlying message is to stay away. Spurgeon makes her own abortive attempt at local connections, writing to Virginia Woolf from New York in 1929:

I have just finished reading A Room of One’s Own, & it has excited & delighted me so greatly that I cannot refrain from writing to thank you […]. You express with such perfection, whimsically, imaginatively & so vividly, what I, with numberless other women, know to be the truth, that people – both men & women – may heed it, just because your have genius has clothed it in this delightful form. […] I should so much like to meet you if you ever had half an hour to spare, but I don’t want to intrude upon that ‘room of your own’. Someone told me you lived near me in Sussex – at Firle. I wonder is that true? I have a cottage nearby Old Postman’s Cottage Alciston, Polegate, Sussex.66

As Spurgeon mentions, Alciston is only a few miles from two Bloomsbury group outposts: Virginia Woolf’s home in Rodmell and Vanessa Bell’s in Firle. As Nuala Hancock details, Woolf and Bell were living in Sussex for the whole period Spurgeon lived in Alciston (1925-1936).67 There is evidence Woolf and Spurgeon might have already known of each other: Christine Kenyon Jones and Anna Snaith claim that they probably crossed paths (along with Edith Morley) whilst they were studying at King’s College Ladies’ Department in London between 1897-1899.68 They were on different courses (Woolf was studying History, Latin, German, and Greek, whilst Spurgeon studied English), but Jones and Snaith point out that there were only around 500 students in the Ladies’ Department at this time (p. 14) and that Woolf would have been

65 Crangle p. 168, quoting Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 83. 66 See letter from Caroline Spurgeon to Virginia Woolf 7th November 1929 in Beth Rigel Daugherty, “You see you kind of belong to us, and what you do matters enormously”: Letters from Readers to Virginia Woolf’, Woolf Studies Annual, 12 (2006), 1-212 (p. 65-66). 67 Nuala Hancock, Charleston and Monk's House: The Intimate House Museums of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), p. 7. 68 Woolf was possibly aware of Edith Morley, if not as a student then later as the first woman professor of English, or as chair of the Browning Society. See Christine Kenyon Jones and Anna Snaith, ‘‘Tilting at Universities’: Woolf At King’s College London’, Woolf Studies Annual, Volume 16 (2010), 1-44 (pp. 14-15, 36). 148

‘conspicuous at the Department’ because her father was on the English syllabus (adding that Spurgeon’s ‘lecture notes taken while she was at King’s frequently quote Leslie Stephen’s Dictionary of National Biography and Hours in a Library’ (p. 15)). If Woolf did not know Spurgeon was a literary scholar when she received the letter, which seems unlikely, she did at some point later: there is a copy of Spurgeon’s 1930 pamphlet, ‘Leading Motives in the Imagery of Shakespeare’s Tragedies’, in her library.69 Woolf does not appear to have accepted the offer of hospitality, however. There is no reply from Woolf in Spurgeon’s correspondence at the Folger Library, but it is difficult to know whether Spurgeon or Gildersleeve, her executor, destroyed correspondence. There are engagement diaries, though, from 1929 and 1930, which do not show a meeting, but she appears to have only sporadically filled them; months on end are blank (S.d.75). Woolf’s engagement diaries from the same period (held at The Keep archive in Sussex) also do not mention a meeting, but there is only 8 years’ worth spanning the period 1930-1941.70 Given that neither writer mentions a meeting with the other, though, it seems plausible that if Woolf and Spurgeon did meet, the connection was not maintained. Indeed, there appears to be very little crossover between the two literary enclaves, bar their mutual acquaintance with Maynard Keynes. College women seem to maintain connections with other college women: in February 1931, the BFUW News Sheet announces that one Miss Dorothy Sayers will be giving a talk on ‘The History, Mechanics and Ethics of Detective Fiction’.71 It is also noteworthy that work by Hancock and others positioning the Bloomsbury group as socially unconventional and sexually experimental does not mention the fact that another highly unorthodox community was nearby.72 Indeed, whereas Charleston House is now famous for being the backdrop for Bell’s ménage à trois with Clive Bell and Duncan Grant, the Old Postman’s Cottage played host to an equally, if not more, scandalous set-up. When recent research does discuss Spurgeon, it tends to make assumptions. In a 2008 survey of Notable Sussex Women, for example, Helena Wojtczak refers to Lilian Clapham as Spurgeon’s ‘life long love’.73 In a 2006

69 Caroline Frances Eleanor Spurgeon, ‘Leading Motives in the Imagery of Shakespeare’s Tragedies’, Shakespeare Association Papers, No. 15. (London: Milford; Oxford University Press, 1930). See Julia King and Laila Miletic- Vejzovic, eds., The library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: a short-title catalog, Washington State University Press. . 70 I am indebted to Sara Crangle for bringing the existence of Woolf’s engagement diaries to my attention. See University of Sussex Library, SxMs-18/4/41, Virginia Woolf Engagement Diaries. 71 British Federation of University Women News Sheet, No.3 (February 1931), p. 2. 72 Only Snaith and Jones explore the connection between Spurgeon and Woolf during their student days. See, for example, Maggie Humm, Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (London: Tate, 2006); Derek Ryan and Stephen Ross, eds., The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group (London; Bloomsbury Academic, 2018); Pamela Todd, Bloomsbury at Home (Brighton: Pavilion, 2001). 73 Helena Wojtczak, Notable Sussex Women: 580 Biographical Sketches (Brighton: Hastings Press, 2008), p. 185. 149 article, Brighton Ourstory magazine suggests that Gildersleeve’s term “intimate friend” in her memoir is a misnomer, because her relationship with Spurgeon was sexual.74 But this cannot be proved conclusively. Gildersleeve herself refers to Spurgeon as a ‘delightful companion’ (p. 204) with whom she shared an ‘intimate friendship’ (p. 130), but, as Lilian Faderman elegantly summarises:

Our century has a passion for categorizing love, as previous centuries did not, which stems from the supposedly liberalized twentieth century view of sex that, ironically, has created its own rigidity. In our century the sex drive was identified, perhaps for the first time in history, as being the foremost instinct—in women as well as men inescapable and all but uncontrollable, and invariably permanently intertwined with real love. As a result, romantic friendships of other eras, which are assumed to have been asexual since women were not given the freedom of their sex drive, are manifestations of sentimentality and the superficial manners of the age. Throughout most of the twentieth century, on the other hand, the enriching romantic friendship that was common in earlier eras is thought to be impossible, since love necessarily means sex and sex between women means lesbian and lesbian means sick (p. 311).

Faderman argues searching for incontrovertible evidence of queer relationships is fraught with both practical and political issues. Being misread appears to be a defining characteristic of women’s relationships; as I mention elsewhere, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch once calls Spurgeon a “bitter virgin”.75 While it would be somewhat ironic if Spurgeon had in fact multiple lovers, it is not necessary to know the nature of her relationships to see that Quiller-Couch’s comment defines sexual activity by narrowly heteronormative measures. I therefore want to propose that Sedgwick’s word ‘queer’ is a better descriptor for Spurgeon’s relationships and how she describes them. Spurgeon’s correspondence at the Folger Library contains various evasive references. When she is touring American women’s colleges in 1918, for example, she writes to Meta Tuke on 29th November: ‘I’m so impatient to get back & take you…’ (S.d.76, see Fig. 7). The rest of the sentence is illegible. Spurgeon often abbreviates words by writing a few letters at the beginning of the word, then putting the final letter or two in superscript, sometimes underlined. But she usually does this when the word is very common, such as the first word in the line below the one I quote shown in Fig. 7, ‘ab[ou]t’, or when the word is very specific, such as

74 ‘Like Dawn in Paradise’, Brighton Ourstory NEWSLETTERS, Issue 19 (Summer 2006). [accessed 21/09/2018]. 75 E. M. W. Tillyard, The Muse Unchained: An Intimate Account of the Revolution in English Studies at Cambridge (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1958), p. 35. 150

‘Eliz[abetha]n’, in her draft of Shakespeare’s Imagery (the last word on the third line from the bottom in Fig. 9). In other words, in most instances, the context removes semantic ambiguity. Sometimes, it is clear from Spurgeon’s correspondence that she is abbreviating to save time. In another letter to Meta, dated 21st August 1922, she signs off ‘L.M.V.D.Y.’, truncating the phrase found in other letters: ‘loving Meta very dearly yes’ (S.d. 76, Fig.8). In the 1918 letter to Meta, though, the first word appears to start with ‘w’ and end with ‘h’, and thus could plausibly be ‘with’, but the second word starts with ‘t’ and end with perhaps ‘ly’ or ‘g’, and is not immediately obvious. I am therefore inclined to conclude that Spurgeon deliberately makes her words difficult to decipher. A more pragmatic reason Spurgeon might abbreviate her earlier letter is provided by her next intimate correspondent, Virginia Gildersleeve. Gildersleeve writes to Spurgeon almost immediately after she has set sail back for England in 1919, writing on fifth, eleventh, and thirteenth of January, and wonders on the latter occasion if the government is ‘still censoring letters’ (S.d. 76) because of the First World War. While Spurgeon does not have to contend with collegiate scrutiny then, she does have to navigate the prying eyes of wider society. Gildersleeve is less inhibited, however. In her first letter on 5th January she describes ‘the odd combination of affection and intellectual exhilaration which [Spurgeon] arouse[s]’ in her and the ‘indefinable electric connection’ she felt ‘the first day’ (S.d. 76). On 11th January she says that Spurgeon’s departure has left ‘a queer kind of hole or gap in things’ and on 28th February she says: ‘I want to waft you over on a magic carpet to this enchanted island’ (S.d. 76). Gildersleeve goes on to say:

Your presumptory demand for some suggestions as to what is to happen about our increasing desire to see each other rather stumps me. […] I have some schemes up my sleeve. […] the women’s colleges + women’s professors participate in this business of exchange developed in my mind immediately after you arrived last October. I think I could make some sort of grand national scheme of it (S.d. 76).

The ‘grand national scheme’ eventually becomes the IFUW. This global network of academic women was engendered by Spurgeon and Gildersleeve’s desire to rekindle their ‘indefinable electric connection’.

151

Figure 7: Letter from Caroline Spurgeon to Meta Tuke, Friday November 29 1918 Photograph by Natalie Wright, from the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

152

Figure 8: Letter from Caroline Spurgeon to Meta Tuke, 21st August 1922 Photograph by Natalie Wright, from the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Figure 9: Spurgeon’s Abbreviations in Manuscript Draft of Shakespeare’s Imagery Photograph by Natalie Wright, from the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

153

Later, in a letter dated 18th January 1931, Spurgeon refers to Clapham and Gildersleeve as her ‘friends with racing hearts’ (S.d. 76). Spurgeon had intended to return to England and to Clapham, who had just received an MBE for her work in the civil service, but Gildersleeve is taken ill, so she decides to stay on in America to look after her. Spurgeon pleads with Clapham, saying that she ‘loves Tooting awful much, & is torn bet[wee]n her 2 little friends with racing hearts!’ Her tone is childish; she refers to herself in the third person and to Clapham with a pet name, ‘Tooting’, as well as a diminutive term.76 The phrase ‘friends with racing hearts’ appears to be another version of ‘intimate friend’ or ‘romantic friend’: a qualification that significantly troubles the term ‘friend’ even as it states it. Other letters to Clapham suggest this, too. In a letter dated January 30th 1931, Spurgeon tells Clapham that the place she is staying at on holiday in Arizona is run by ‘2 ladies – friends’ (S.d. 76). Again, we cannot be certain what she is communicating here. Spurgeon could be explaining that the two ladies are not sisters, of course, but, in the context of the other phrases she and Gildersleeve use to describe the women in their life, the fact that Spurgeon clarifies their relationship suggests something is being encoded. While ‘friends’ means ‘friends’, ‘friends’ with qualifications means something else. Even in private correspondence, therefore, queer relationships demand coded language, because, as Sedgwick says, they defy monolithic symbols.

A Place That Alters All One’s Values

Unlike Priscilla’s aunt in A Sweet Girl Graduate, I want to argue that learning does not make women ‘half-mannish’, poor imitations of a male ideal, nor does it necessarily de-gender women. College communities did not empty out the personal; they allow new forms of the interpersonal. Edith Morley says in her memoir:

I well remember when I was at college being exhorted to attend carefully to such details of dress, lest I made it more difficult for other girls to obtain permission to study, and therefore to become ‘queer’ and unlike other people (p. 62).

I believe collegiate learning did indeed make women queer, disturbing the tropes of femininity for women in college, giving them new ways to perform its rituals of care and tutorship without

76 Spurgeon also uses the third person to make appeals to her correspondent when she tells Lilian on 30th October 1935 that she ‘loves [her] awful hard, & doesn’t want to leave – [your] own Rab[bit, her pet name for herself]’ (S.d. 76). 154 familial obligation or patriarchal playbooks. The women’s college is, as Q. D. Leavis says, ‘a place that alters all one’s values’, inspiring women like Spurgeon to create their own extramural incarnations. They are also places that queer literary cultures, creating new narratives, symbols, and tropes. As such, they demand queer reading. Their codes are situationally significant and only legible through collective reading, as genre pieces or against other accounts from the period. It is crucial to recognise women’s academic literary cultures as a distinct literary phenomenon, separate from modernist novels, detective fiction, or other contemporary trends. Women’s writing about collegiate environments suggests, then, that environments do shape literary qualities; that women studying in early literary departments write about college in a certain way because they had studied at college. Or, to use Leavis’s words, that it is possible to see the ‘room behind the mind’. When we look at women’s university fiction and criticism together, we see that what the university considers bad (paranoid) reading and bad (middlebrow) writing appears to simply be queer, feminine cultural literacy.

Jane Austen, Miracle-worker: Women Canonising Novels

As an inducement to subscribe [to her private library] Mrs Martin tells us that her Collection is not to consist only of Novels, but of every kind of Literature &c &c - She might have spared this pretension to our family, who are great Novel- readers and not ashamed of being so;- but it was necessary I suppose to the self-consequence of half her Subscribers. Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, 1798

Raising Novels to the Level of Art

This chapter looks at early women scholars’ role in introducing the novel as an acceptable object for academic literary study and how they engage with the gendered discourse surrounding its status. By comparing the critical approaches of two pioneering women scholars, Q. D. Leavis and Caroline Spurgeon, towards one of the most famous women novelists in the English language, Jane Austen, I explore the ways in which women scholars study the novel before academia as a whole deems it appropriate. In order to contextualise their debate, I begin this chapter with an introduction to early academic work on the novel from two angles: an institution and an author. First, I survey the status of the novel at Cambridge University, using early syllabuses and the work of I. A. Richards, because the institution is the backdrop for existing accounts of the origins of the study of the novel, which tend to presume that novel studies begin with F. R. Leavis’s 1948 book, The Great Tradition. Chris Baldick, for example, states that F. R. Leavis was the first scholar ‘to establish the first authoritative critical scale upon which the English novelists were to be measured’.1 The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism dedicates a whole chapter to Leavis, claiming that he ‘was one of the most potent single influences on English studies in the earlier and middle part of the twentieth century’.2 In this chapter, I want to challenge this narrative, however, and argue that women are doing significant work on the novel before 1948. Not all women scholars

1 Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848-1932 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), p. 162. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 2 Michael Bell, ‘F. R. Leavis’, in A. Walton Litz, Louis Menand, Lawrence Rainey, eds., The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 7: Modernism and the New Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 389- 422 (p. 389). 156 engage with the novel in this early era, of course, but scholars who are working on the novel tend to be women, and several women make substantial interventions into the field before the supposed watershed moment. I therefore move on to look at which scholars undertake early studies of Virginia Woolf, a prominent contemporary woman novelist and therefore prime for canonisation, before discussing Leavis’s and Spurgeon’s work on Austen. Taking a brief tour through Edith Morley’s study on Fanny Burney, I argue that there is a shift between what Morley and Spurgeon commends in these early women novelists’ work and what Leavis commends. That is to say, that the two earlier scholars value Burney’s attention to ‘girl’s sensations’ (Morley) and Austen’s ‘delight in parody’ (Spurgeon), whereas Leavis values narrative ‘thriftiness’ and ‘awareness’ and characters who display ‘candour’.3 I argue that these scholars’ differing literary sentiments reflect a shift in how academia sees fiction; essentially, from disturbingly feminine to salubriously masculine. I go on to look at how Morley and Spurgeon see Austen and Burney as initiators of a new narrative tradition presenting feminine perspectives, whereas Q. D. Leavis tries to cement Austen’s place in a lineage of modern novels. The final section of this chapter looks at how and where Q. D. Leavis outlines that lineage. Her husband, F. R. Leavis, published several books on poetry, contemporary culture, and teaching literature in the 1930s and ‘40s, but is probably most famous for The Great Tradition.4 The book traces artistic continuities through the works of George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad, arguing that their work is distinguished by a ‘vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity’, and that they promote ‘human awareness’, in a way that is distinctly ‘English’.5 Like later historians, Leavis saw himself as a key figure in novel studies. Claudia Johnson notes, for example, that in the 1950s he accused another scholar critiquing the novel of plagiarism, because he considered the entire field ‘his intellectual

3 Edith J. Morley, Fanny Burney (London: English Association, 1925), p. 15. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text abbreviated as FB. Caroline Spurgeon, ‘Jane Austen’, in Margaret L. Woods, ed., Essays by Divers Hands: Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, 7, New Series (1927), pp. 81-104 (p. 100). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. Q. D. Leavis, ‘A Critical Theory of Jane Austen’s Writings (I)’, in Collected Essays, Volume 1: The Englishness of the English Novel, ed. by G. S. Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 61-87 (pp. 85, 80). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text abbreviated as I. Q. D. Leavis, ‘A Critical Theory of Jane Austen’s Writings, IIb: Lady Susan into Mansfield Park (concluded)’, in Collected Essays, Volume 1: The Englishness of the English Novel, ed. by G. S. Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 111-130 (p. 127). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text abbreviated as IIb. 4 See, for example, F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (London: Chatto & Windus 1933); F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of the Contemporary Situation (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932); F.R. Leavis Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture, (Cambridge: The Minority Press at Cambridge, Eng. Gordon Fraser at St. John’s College Cambridge, 1930). 5 F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (New York: George W. Stewart, 1950), p. 7. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 157 property, something that he and his wife alone put “on the agenda” (emphasis in the original)’.6 While Johnson acknowledges that his claim of sole ownership over an area of study is rather hubristic, to say the least, she nevertheless claims that he did invent the evaluative approach that came to dominate it:

In positing a ‘great tradition’, [F. R.] Leavis mapped out how novels were to be understood in qualitative relation to other novels, and he set the terms on which novels were to be discussed as a collectivity; in short, he invented the idea and the practice of the modern novelistic canon. And, in raising novels to the level of art deserving and requiring disciplined study, he created novel studies as a field whose work was to be differentiated from the chit-chat of genteel readers who regarded novels as entertainment (ENJP p. 200).

I want to argue, instead, that F. R. Leavis did none of these things alone. If one adopts Johnson’s criteria that ‘raising novels to the level of art’ involves ‘disciplined study’, then there are surely many attempts at novel studies before 1948, but I want to focus on two in particular. By looking firstly at how Q. D. Leavis’s theories on Austen in the early 1940s expound many of the values present in The Great Tradition, and, secondly, weighing up the evidence of her input in the eponymously titled first chapter of The Great Tradition, I want to propose that the female Leavis is the one interested in tradition-making. Even as the Leavises herald Austen, though, and try to rescue her from the connotations of being a lady novelist, from ‘chit-chat’ and gentility, they subject her to other gendered stereotypes. The introductory chapter of The Great Tradition, for example, cites Jane Austen as ‘the inaugurator of the great tradition’ (p. 7), yet the rest of the book does not address her work in any detail. While, as I discuss towards the end of this chapter, there are possible practical reasons for this, it is nonetheless apt that the book affixes Austen to the typical feminine role of having birthed an entire dynasty, inspiring others and chalking a path from them, without reaping any of the rewards. In another early monograph, Ian Watt’s 1957 The Rise of the Novel, Watt sees Austen in-but-not-of a different tradition. He describes Austen as the ‘climax’ of a tradition begun by Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding.7 Like Leavis, Watt praises Austen

6 Ian MacKillop, F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism (London: Allen Lane, 1995), p. 268, quoted in Claudia Johnson, ‘Leavis, “The Great Tradition” of the English Novel and the Jewish Part’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 56, No. 2, (September 2001), 198-227 (p. 199). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text abbreviated as ENJP. 7 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London: Penguin Books, 1963), p. 310. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 158 briefly and in passing, in a ‘Note’ after the main chapters.8 These two early, influential studies of mostly male novelists thus award Austen a strangely privileged yet adjacent position to the canon. The texts I focus on in this chapter, however, situate Austen centre stage. Indeed, Leavis, Morley, and Spurgeon are all literate in a different and wholly female lineage: Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot. The majority of this chapter is devoted to the critical antagonism between Spurgeon and Leavis. In four articles, published in Scrutiny in 1941 and 1942, Q. D. Leavis articulates an extensive ‘Critical Theory of Jane Austen’s Writings’, which responds primarily to Caroline Spurgeon’s 1927 lecture on ‘Jane Austen’ for the Royal Society of Literature. Comparing their criticism, two sets of values appear. Spurgeon thinks that Austen’s work is a ‘miracle’ (p. 83), because the writer’s circumstances were not especially intellectually nurturing. Leavis claims that Austen’s genius is the result of ‘hard work’ (I p. 66), and that her novels demand serious reading. Spurgeon claims that critics should unearth ‘every scrap of information [they] can gather, every ray of light that can be thrown upon [the author’s] character’ (p. 81); Leavis argues that it is only acceptable to ‘drag in biography […] to illuminate strictly critical problems’ (I p. 64). Scholars have never discussed Spurgeon’s lecture and Leavis’s theory in tandem, but I believe that their debates demonstrate a significant turn within the discourse around the academic study of the novel.9 Johnson claims that ‘further study’ is needed on how ‘the elevation of novel studies has a distinct relation to Austen’ and how this was ‘still undone as late as 1940, when the curriculum at Oxbridge was being revised’.10 I want to argue that Leavis’s ‘Critical Theory’ pre-empts The Great Tradition in claiming Austen for what Johnson describes as ‘the modern novelistic canon (my emphasis)’, because by arguing her case using the new masculine critical idiom, Leavis implicitly removes her from an earlier, distinctly feminine, canon. The final thread running through this chapter is how the shifting discourse on the novel might inform how academia gendered the analytical skills it asks of literary students and scholars,

8 Edith Morley notes that the final chapter also only ‘briefly surveys the later novelists of the century, Smollett, Sterne, and Fanny Burney’ in a review. Edith Morley, ‘XIII. The Eighteenth Century’, Year’s Work in English Studies 38, No. 1 (1959), 193-202 (pp. 195-6). 9 Johnson also discusses Garrod’s lecture but does not mention Leavis’s ‘Critical Theory’ and only refers to the original provocateur in passing, misspelling her name ‘Sturgeon’. See Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2012), pp. 124-5. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text abbreviated as CC. B. C. Southam mentions Spurgeon’s lecture briefly and writes about Leavis separately in an article on ‘Mrs. Leavis and Miss Austen’. B. C. Southam, ‘Mrs. Leavis and Miss Austen: The “Critical Theory” Reconsidered’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Issue 17, No. 1 (1962), 21-32. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text abbreviated as CTR. 10 Claudia L. Johnson, ‘The Divine Miss Jane: Jane Austen, Janeites, and the Discipline of Novel Studies’, boundary 2, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Autumn, 1996), 143-163 (p. 163). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text abbreviated as DMJ. 159 too. I want to argue that Austen is such a point of heated contention for Q. D. Leavis, a key figure for Morley and Spurgeon, and an important correlative for Watt and F. R. Leavis, because she creates markedly feminine worlds that create meaning from markedly feminine concerns. In a later essay on Austen, titled ‘Novelist of a Changing Society’, Leavis says that while Henry James claims Austen was ‘unconscious and naïve as an artist’,

a more intelligent, and a woman novelist, Mrs Oliphant, argues in 1870 in Blackwood's Magazine that Miss Austen’s ‘is not the simple character it appears at first glance, but one of subtle power, keenness, finesse and self-restraint – type not at all unusual in women of high cultivation’.11

Leavis believes, in short, that women can see other women’s worth; that the qualities one needs to read Austen’s work align with the qualities society requires of both women novelists and their female characters. In Austen’s worlds, social and narrative meaning hinge on one’s emotional intelligence, one’s ability to discern motives, morals, and social norms. Leavis makes the case for these skills, however, using masculine critical terms. In particular, she renounces emotional responses to literature and biographical scholarship, like I. A. Richards. When she insists that the miraculous must be dissected, that women’s literary talent is not amateur because only hard work will do, she echoes the rhetoric of rigour, impersonality, and laborious reading I explore in the other chapters of this project. I want to argue that this rhetoric encourages novel readers to use technical skills, not a social one, thus disenfranchising early women scholars from the emotional acuity society had compelled them to develop.

The Half-forgotten Sentimental Novel

It may seem surprising that such a prominent literary form as the novel was not always a feature of university English studies. But in the early decades of literary degrees scholars generally considered prose fiction unworthy of academic scrutiny, more appropriate material for journalists, gentlemanly belletrists, or novelists themselves. Infant English departments were keen to distance themselves from associations with unapprenticed or amateur pursuits, such as appraising the latest penny dreadful. In a 1933 essay, Cambridge scholar F. L. Lucas, says

11 Q. D. Leavis, ‘Novelist of a Changing Society’, in Collected Essays, Volume 1: The Englishness of the English Novel, ed. by G. S. Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 26-60 (p. 26). 160 adamantly: ‘[w]e are not training reviewers’.12 Lucas’s colleague, E. M. W. Tillyard, similarly notes that the English degree at Cambridge was derisively known in its early decades as the ‘Novel-Reading Tripos’ because detractors saw literature as a pastime, even though the Student Handbook shows that novels were only sparsely taught.13 It is extremely difficult to make claims about the syllabuses at Cambridge (or Oxford) in toto, because colleges had a large amount of influence over which texts they taught, but the annual Student Handbook does give a snapshot of which authors literary studies accepted as examination material.14 In the first year Cambridge offered an English course, 1916-1917, for example, modules include ‘essays on the outlines of English Literature from 1350 to 1832’, Old English, ‘the History of the English Language’, and ‘the general history of literary criticism’, as well as a ‘special period and book’ from a list including Chaucer, Beowulf, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Swift, Defoe, Pope, Goldsmith, Blake, and the Romantic poets.15 By the 1939-40 academic year, Anglo-Saxon, Early Norse, ‘the Essay’, ‘English Literature, Life and Thought’ in various centuries, ‘Criticism and Composition’, and ‘Tragedy’ had been added to the list, plus special authors including Keats, Browning, Aristotle, Donne, Sidney, Arnold, and Dante.16 It is possible to broadly say, then, that Cambridge’s focus in this era is on drama, poetry, and essays.17 There is very little scope for studying the novel. Novels are also scarce in I. A. Richards’s famous experiments in ‘Practical Criticism’, which ran at Cambridge from 1925, except when Richard employs them as instructively bad examples. His notebooks show that in the introductory lecture to the course, for instance, he mentions William de Morgan’s 1906 novel, Joseph Vance, to garner sympathy for his experimental approach. Richards uses the novel as a cautionary tale; the story dissuades people from trying anything new in case they fail.18 Richards begins his lecture: ‘[s]ome of you may remember a passage in a half-forgotten novel which only missed greatness through its sentimentality’.19

12 F. L. Lucas, ‘English Literature’, in University Studies: Cambridge 1933 ed. by Harold Wright (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1933), p. 281. 13 E. M. W. Tillyard, The Muse Unchained: An Intimate Account of the Revolution in English Studies at Cambridge (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1958), pp. 71-2. 14 The minutes of Cambridge University’s Faculty of English meetings show that pedagogical consistency is a perennial problem. In 1930-31, the minutes note that ‘[t]he meeting was in favour of a standardization of the First Year Course for Part I of the Tripos’, and in 1959 again ‘[s]everal speakers drew attention to the problems connected with the relationship between College and the University teaching’. Cambridge University Library, ENGL 2/10/1, English Faculty Meeting Minutes 1926-1968. 15 See Student Handbook 1916-1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916), pp. 437-9. 16 See Student Handbook 1939-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), pp. 390-398. 17 In 1958, the English Faculty minutes note that there are still gaps in the department’s teaching on the novel, especially on Fanny Burney and Jane Austen. Cambridge University Library, ENGL 3/24/1, Minutes of the Faculty of English 1956-1981. 18 William De Morgan, Joseph Vance: An ill-written autobiography (London: William Heinemann, 1906). 19 I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment, ed. by John Constable (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. xi-xii. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 161

Richards suggests, as he does elsewhere, that literary greatness and excessive emotion are mutually exclusive.20 The archive shows, though, that he does occasionally examine his students on extracts from novels, but that he again uses them negatively, or even inaccurately. In the ‘Passages for Critical Comment’ Richards uses in 1932, for example, the ‘clue on the back’ to the only prose passage is incorrect: ‘V. Woolf, The Journey Out’ (the actual title is The Voyage Out).21 In an undated set of questions for a ‘Humanities 132 Final Examination’, the one concerning novels asks the student to either ‘[d]iscuss the view that Tess of the Durbervilles [sic] and Jude the Obscure are spoilt by much intrusion of the author’s philosophical opinions’ or ‘[e]xamine the opinion that Hardy’s plots are weak and conventional with reference to as many of his novels as time allows’.22 The questions do allow for alternative points of view, of course, but given that both are negative appraisals, along with Richards’s careless mistake with Woolf’s title, they suggest that Richards does not consider the novel to be poetry’s equal. It seems apt, then, that his critical straw man in the original ‘Practical Criticism’ lecture is a half-forgotten, sentimental novel. Judging by the amount of scholarly publications on the novel in the early twentieth century, the wider academic community also appears to consider the novel below its gaze. Notable exceptions include Walter Raleigh’s The English Novel (1894) and R. Brimley Johnson’s The Women Novelists (1914), but both were men-of-letters types.23 Indeed, although Raleigh became Oxford’s first English professor in 1904, he was extremely disparaging of academic literary criticism, saying in a letter that ‘the first modern critic was a eunuch’.24 In 1932, Q. D. Leavis writes in Fiction and the Reading Public that there are currently ‘two accepted methods of dealing with the Novel’, the ‘critic’s’ and the ‘scholar’s’, and that neither are satisfactory.25 According to Leavis, the former includes unsystematic musings by belletrists such as Raleigh, or novelists such as Woolf and Forster, and the latter consists of dry ‘plots and histories’ (p. xiv),

20 In Practical Criticism, Richards describes sentimentality pathologically as ‘fatigue, illness’ (p. 257). 21 Magdalene College Old Library, The Richards Collection, Box 17 Tripos Papers and Practical Criticism Protocols, ‘Humanities 132 Final Examination’. 22 Magdalene College Old Library, The Richards Collection, Box 17 Tripos Papers and Practical Criticism Protocols, ‘Humanities 132 Final Examination’. 23 In the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, A. Walton Litz calls Raleigh as ‘man of letters turned professor’ (p. 312). Chris Baldick quotes Raleigh saying that ‘the main business of Criticism, after all is not to legislate, not to classify, but to raise the dead’ (p. 78). Claudia Johnson calls R. Brimley Johnson’s 1892 editions of Austen’s novels ‘quasi-scholarly’ (CC p. 68). 24 Letter to John Sampson, 31st December 1904, Walter Raleigh, The Selected Letters of Walter Raleigh (1879-1922), ed. Lady Raleigh, (London: Methuen & Co., 1926), pp. 268-9. 25 Leavis adds that ‘Henry James in ‘Notes on Novelists’ and to a much lesser degree Mr. [Percy] Lubbock in ‘The Craft of Fiction’ [(1921)], have made serious attempts to grapple with the criticism of the novel, but both books, the former in part and the latter wholly, are approaches from the academic angle.’ See Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932), pp. xiii-xiv. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 162 such as Ernest Baker’s ten volume History of the English Novel (published 1924-1939). Leavis finds both inadequate because they are ‘from the academic angle’ (p. iii), but she does not mean that they literally originate in universities. She goes on to say that these kinds of criticism give ‘no indication that [the novels] ever had readers, much less that they played any part in shaping the human spirit and were shaped by it’ (p. iv). As I explore in the next section, though, Leavis wants to legislate how exactly the novel shapes its readers. If histories of the discipline consider novel studies to begin with The Great Tradition, this is not because scholars did not study the novel before this date, however. I want to argue that those who do, are either not held in high regard by academia, or do not use methods held in high regard. To demonstrate this theory, I present as a case study the reception of Virginia Woolf before 1948. As a woman novelist contemporaneous to the early days of academic literary studies, one might expect Woolf’s reputation to be more hotly contested, yet she is now consistently canonised. So, in those early years, is she accepted or reviled? According to the British Library catalogue, the first studies on Woolf are published in 1932 (the same year as Fiction and the Reading Public). These are Oxford graduate Winifred Holtby’s non-academic book, Virginia Woolf, and theses by Ingeborg Badenhausen in Germany and Floris Delattre in France.26 (Also in 1932, Muriel Bradbrook publishes ‘Notes on the Style of Mrs. Woolf’ in the pages of Scrutiny, the Leavises’ literary magazine.27) Over the next sixteen years theses on Woolf appear in Germany by Ilse Finke (1933), Eva Weidner (1934), Ruth Gruber (1935) and Gertrud Lohmueller (1937), Isobel Griscom at the University of Wisconsin (1935), and in Buenos Aires by Lila E. Rillo (1941) and Ines Verga (1945).28 In 1945, Leavis’s Girton contemporary Joan Bennett publishes Virginia Woolf: Her Art as a Novelist with Cambridge University Press.29 Early male critics are usually novelists as well as academics, such as Forster.30 Only in the years approaching The Great Tradition’s publication do men publish scholarly books on Woolf, including David Daiches in 1945

26 Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf (London: Wishart & Co., 1932); Ingeborg Badenhausen, ‘Die Sprache Virginia Woolfs: ein Beitrag zur Stilistik des modernen englischen Romans’ (Marburg, 1932); Floris Delattre, ‘Le Roman Psychologique de Virginia Woolf’ (Paris, 1932). 27 Muriel Bradbrook, ‘Notes on the Style of Mrs. Woolf’, Scrutiny, 1 (1932), 33-38. 28 Ilse Finke ‘Virginia Woolfs Stellung zur Wirklichkeit. Inaugural-Dissertation, etc.’ (Marburg, 1933); Eva Weidner, ‘Impressionismus und Expressionismus in den Romanen Virginia Woolfs: Inaugural-Dissertation, etc.’ (Greifswald, 1934); Ruth Gruber, ‘Virginia Woolf: A Study’ (Leipzig, 1935); Gertrud Lohmueller, ‘Die Frau im Werk von Virginia Woolf: ein Beitrag zur psychologischen und stilistischen Untersuchung des neuesten englischen Frauenromans’ (Leipzig, 1937); Isobel Griscom, ‘Virginia Woolf’, (University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1935); Lila E. Rillo, ‘Katherine Mansfield, 1888-1923, and Virginia Woolf, 1882-1941’ (Buenos Aires, 1941); Ines Verga, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Novels and their Analogy to Music’ (Buenos Aires, 1945). 29 Joan Bennett, Virginia Woolf: Her Art as a Novelist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945); Deborah Newton, Virginia Woolf (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1946). 30 See E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942). 163 and R. L. Chambers in 1947.31 A clear pattern is therefore discernible: early critics of Woolf are mostly women, students, and novelists, all of whom academia feminises at this time. Woolf’s reception also shows, however, that looking at only published books tells a partial story. For a different perspective, I now want to turn to my three protagonists in this project, whose work on the novel indicates that women’s criticism often falls under the radar of bibliographies and library catalogues. Q. D. Leavis, for example, produces an enormous amount on the novel, but it is mostly published in Scrutiny magazine, only posthumously compiled into three volumes of Collected Essays by G. S. Singh. Before 1948, though, she publishes articles on Sylvia Townsend Warner (1932, 1936), Virginia Woolf (1938), Edith Wharton (1938), Dorothy Sayers (1937), Rosamond Lehmann (1936), Dorothy Richardson (1935), Naomi Mitchison (1935), Storm Jameson (1935), Jane Austen (1941-2, 1944), and Charlotte Yonge (1944).32 Leavis also writes about many male novelists in this period, but the sheer number of women in her portfolio is noteworthy considering that at this time her husband is writing almost entirely on poetry. Furthermore, the Collected Essays published for the first time a large body of work spanning her career on Mrs Inchbald, George Eliot, Mrs Oliphant, women’s religious novels, and ‘Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century’.33 It is imperative to look for women’s early criticism beyond the library stacks, because, as I discuss in chapter one, women at this time were hindered by many barriers from writing the kinds of lengthy studies amenable to publication. Edith Morley’s and Caroline Spurgeon’s writing on women novelists is even harder to find. Apart from Morley’s pamphlet on Fanny Burney and her article on Sarah Harriet Burney, neither scholar publishes on the novel. Archival records show, however, that they regularly taught on it.34 From teaching materials at Reading and Royal Holloway, we can see that both Morley and Spurgeon were familiar with the work of Fanny Burney, Henry Fielding, George Eliot, the Brontës, Jane Austen, as well as contemporaries such as Woolf and Mansfield. An advertisement shows that as early as 1902, for example, Spurgeon is teaching a ‘special course of 8 weekly lectures at Bedford College for Women on “The Rise and Development of the English Novel”’.35 In 1912, Edith Morley gives a lecture on Austen to the Reading Workers’ Education

31 See David Daiches, Virginia Woolf (1945); R. L. Chambers, The Novels of Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh; London: Oliver & Boyd, 1947). 32 For a full bibliography, see José Ramón Díaz Fernández, ‘Q. D. Leavis: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources’, Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 7 (1994), 213-39. 33 See Q. D. Leavis, Collected Essays, Volume 3: The Novels of Religious Controversy, ed. by G. S. Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 34 Edith J. Morley, ‘Sarah Harriet Burney, 1770-1844’, Modern Philology, Vol. 39, Issue 2 (1941), 123-158. 35 ‘The Rise and Development of the English Novel’, The Educational Times, and Journal of the College of Preceptors, Volume 55 (C. F. Hodgson & Son, 1902), p. 214. 164

Association.36 It is important to review this work alongside published articles and books because, although, as we see in chapter one, academia rarely values pedagogical criticism at this time, it clearly imparts literary values. The archival research in this chapter therefore performs the vital feminist task of recovering evidence of women studying the novel long before academia generally considers it acceptable, in the classroom, a forum it rarely associates with profound intellectual developments. My research thus expands these early women scholars’ bibliographies, but also points to a need to re-evaluate what qualifies as scholarship when looking at marginalised intellectual subjects. Women’s teaching on the novel also troubles the narrative that F. R. Leavis single- handedly pioneered novel studies, because, as well as The Great Tradition, biographers often attribute his sweeping overhaul of novel criticism to his controversial teaching. Former pupil David Ellis, for example, says that Leavis’s

willingness to discuss Ulysses [published in France in 1922, banned in the U.K. until 1936] and Lady Chatterley’s Lover [published in Italy in 1928, banned in the U.K. until 1960] had incurred sufficient official disfavor for there to have been talk in an undergraduate magazine of ‘the Leavis prize for pornography’.37

Looking back at the Cambridge syllabuses I quote earlier, it is clear that these texts are a radical departure. But Leavis is not necessarily the only pioneering pedagogue. The ‘Director of Studies in English Record Book’ at Girton shows that the very first year English is offered, 1917-1918, Elizabeth Drew teaches ‘Victorian Novelists’ and two years later I. A. Richards lectures on ‘Modern Novels’.38 In fact, when women taught on the novel it was arguably even more ground- breaking than when Leavis did, because they risked being doubly feminised. Like Edith Morley or Miss Steele Smith, as I discuss in chapter one, women doing so-called ‘feminine’ scholarship may suffer insults or professional ill-treatment. Thus, while they may not author impressive tomes on the novel, women studying the novel in the early years boldly uphold the value of a literary form academia considers intellectually flimsy, even while their own academic abilities are in question.39

36 Reading University, Special Collections, Edith Morley Collection, MS 938/4/57, ‘Notes on Lectures delivered’, ‘Jane Austen Lecture to Reading WEA Oct 30th 1912’. Further references to this collection are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text abbreviated as JA. 37 David Ellis, Memoirs of a Leavisite: The Decline and Fall of Cambridge English (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), p. 45. 38 In comparison, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch lectures on the ‘Poetry of Meredith’, ‘Value of Greek & Latin in Eng. Lit.’, ‘Poetry of Hardy’, and ‘Reading the Bible’. Girton College Archive, GCAC 2/2/9, ‘Director of Studies in English Record Book’, Volume I. (1917 - 1936). 39 It was also a departure from their academic mentors. Whereas women studying texts before the birth of literary studies are usually philologists, as I discuss in chapter one, most women in early English departments deviate from a linguistic approach. Q. D. Leavis writes mostly on the novel, Edith Morley writes on Frances Burney, John Ruskin, and Henry Crabb Robinson, Caroline Spurgeon’s major studies are on Shakespeare and Chaucer. At Girton the rule 165

It seems apt, though, that these women make modest, ephemeral contributions towards the shaping of their discipline with a literary object that celebrates the quotidian and the unheroic. As Ian Watt argues, the novel is characterised by a realism rooted in ‘the texture of daily experience’ (pp. 22-3). While Watt focuses on Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, Edith Morley argues that Fanny Burney exceeds these male predecessors because she illuminates distinctly feminine ‘commonplaces’ (p. 15). Even though Q. D. Leavis is concerned about the novel’s ubiquity, she nevertheless recognises its power, saying in Fiction and the Reading Public that academia needs new critical methods in order to ‘take account of the fiction that does not happen to be, or to have become, literature’ (pp. xiii-xiv). When women scholars address the literary quotidian in a prestigious professional realm, they reprise the innovations of early women novelists such as Austen, who Morley commends for creating ‘delight in simple things & ordinary people’ (JA p. 6). Three years after Leavis, Amy Cruse, a teacher by day, releases another systematic assessment of the general reading public called The Victorians and Their Books. Walter Raleigh consequently dismisses her as an ‘ambitious school marm’, but by doing so highlights that women at this time sometimes benefit from a lack of formal training in a discipline that would not school them in their chosen literary form anyway.40 When women research and teach on the novel, it may not have the polemical fanfare of The Great Tradition, but I would argue that it is still an act of canonisation. Putting novels on syllabuses implicitly advocates for those texts to be read, and thus surely contributes towards the sea-change in their reputation.

The Nature of a Miracle

I want to look now at the moment when the first and second generation of women scholars collide over the importance of one particular woman novelist. On 23rd February 1927, Professor Caroline Spurgeon gave a lecture to the Royal Society of Literature titled simply, ‘Jane Austen’. It was one of several glowing appraisals of Austen’s work at this time, with Montague Summers also giving an ‘Appreciation’ to the Society nine years earlier.41 The editor of collected lectures, Margaret Woods, writes the year Spurgeon speaks that ‘[a]ll good Janeites will welcome Dr holds too: Leavis’s contemporaries include Muriel Bradbrook, who becomes a Shakespearian scholar, and Gwyneth Lloyd Thomas, Kathleen Raine, and Elsie Duncan Jones, who all study poetry from various centuries. 40 See Amy Cruse, The Victorians and their Books (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1935). Chapman to Raleigh, August 30, 1912; Raleigh to Chapman, August 31, 1912, quoted in Patrick Buckridge, ‘The Fate of an “Ambitious School- Marm”: Amy Cruse and the History of Reading’, Book History, 16. 1 (2016), 272-293 (p. 274). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 41 Montague Summers, ‘Jane Austen: An Appreciation’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, 36 (1918), 1-33. 166

Caroline Spurgeon’s appreciation’. 42 But not all Society members were good Janeites. The following year, H. W. Garrod retaliated with ‘A Depreciation’, bemoaning the recent ‘notable boom in Miss Austen’.43 In a note appended to the published version, Garrod petitions the reader ‘not to take [his criticisms] too seriously’ (p. 23), because he wrote the talk ‘in lightness of heart’ (p. 21). He presents Austen’s defenders, in contrast, as humourless; people to whom ‘speaking lightly about Miss Austen is as bad as “speaking against the Prayer Book” (p. 21). The people to whom he and Woods are referring to are the ‘Janeites’, a formal and at the time widely known aristocratic fan club of which Spurgeon was a member. Garrod’s religious idiom is not an exaggeration. Spurgeon’s most controversial statement in the lecture, on which I will now focus, is her claim that Austen’s work is a ‘miracle’ (p. 83). In this section, by tracking Spurgeon’s effusive commendation and Leavis’s reaction to it, I try to show how early academic literary studies feminises and banishes two aspects of literary criticism: emotional responses and biographical readings. As Claudia Johnson explains, Spurgeon was an anomaly among Austen’s acolytes:

the Janeitism of the early twentieth century was, with the prominent exception of Shakespeare scholar Caroline Spurgeon, principally a male enthusiasm shared among an elite corps of publishers, professors, and literati, such as Montague Summers, A. C. Bradley, Lord David Cecil, Sir Walter Raleigh, R. W. Chapman, and E. M. Forster (DMJ p. 150).

Spurgeon’s lecture proved to be a ‘prominent exception’, too, because it induced a major intervention in the field of novel studies. Fourteen years after Spurgeon describes Austen’s work as a ‘miracle’, her comment inspires another retaliatory diatribe from Q. D. Leavis. In a four part ‘Critical Theory’, published between 1941 and 1942, Leavis articulates an extensive argument about Austen’s ‘habits of composition’ (I p. 64). She opens the theory with a scathing comment on Spurgeon’s lecture, saying that while in some circles ‘[i]t is common to speak of Jane Austen’s novels as a miracle’ (I p. 61), others manage to appreciate Austen’s magic whilst retaining their critical faculties. She says that Virginia Woolf, for example, looks at Austen’s work ‘with a novelist’s eye’ and observes that ‘she was no conjuror after all’ (I p. 61). Leavis sees Spurgeon’s response as wholly inappropriate for a scholar, saying: the ‘business of literary criticism is surely

42 Margaret L. Woods, ed., Essays by Divers Hands: Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, 7, New Series (1927), pp. v-vi (p. v). 43 H. W. Garrod, ‘Jane Austen: A Depreciation’, Essays by Divers Hands: Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, 8, New Series (1928), pp. 21-40 (p. 39). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 167 not to say ‘Inspiration’ and fall down and worship’ (I p. 62). 44 As far as Leavis is concerned, the word ‘miracle’ makes Austen seem an undisciplined amateur, her work juvenile candyfloss, and her perception mere regurgitation. While Leavis rightly observes that intellectuals often tarnished Austen with such stereotypically feminine, pejorative qualities, she does not aid the cause of women writers or scholars when she argues that Austen’s ‘inspiration then turns out to be, as Inspiration so often does, a matter of hard work’ (I p. 66). Leavis is directly responding to critics such as Garrod, who claims in his ‘Depreciation’, for example, that Austen’s novels are the ‘infant wailings’ (p. 23) of a ‘mere slip of a girl’ (p. 40). But by implying that Austen should be read studiously and treated seriously, she rejects the whole register of emotional criticism Spurgeon employs, thus parroting the masculine rhetoric of scholars such as I. A. Richards and William Empson.45 Indeed, Leavis’s main argument in the ‘Critical Theory’ is that Austen’s ‘peculiar habits of composition […] destroy the popular notion of her writing by direct inspiration’ because they demonstrate ‘thoroughly conscious, laborious, separate draftings’ (I p. 64). Leavis concentrates on compositional methods because she believes that they prove Austen is diligent and serious:

Miss Austen was not an inspired amateur who had scribbled in childhood and then lightly tossed off masterpieces between callers; she was a steady professional writer who had to put in many years of thought and labour to achieve each novel, and she took her novels very seriously (I p. 65).

Leavis’s argument seems to go that if women writers are serious and hardworking, they cannot be reservoirs of uncontrolled emotion or mere conduits for information. For her, exuberant emotions preclude perceptiveness. I would suggest, then, that The Great Tradition is not the first study to spear-head what Claudia Johnson describes as the shift from ‘scholar-gentlemen at play’ towards ‘regarding [critical] interest in Austen as “work”’ and ‘reading [Austen] properly, vigorously, manfully’ (CC p. 151). Seven years earlier, Q. D. Leavis uses the same critical rhetoric. But does Spurgeon actually ‘worship’ Austen thoughtlessly? She certainly revels in how pleasurable she finds the novels, mentioning, for example, that they are ‘very easy reading, and delight to read aloud’ (p. 98). But she goes on to add that ‘until they are closely looked at it may not be realized how many kinds of conversations [Austen] records, and how amazingly skilful she

44 B. C. Southam similarly writes that Spurgeon’s ‘fulsome eulogy’ is the battle cry of the ‘establishment line’. B.C. Southam, Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, Vol. 2 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 105. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text abbreviated as CH. 45 The capitalised ‘Inspiration’ here suggests that Leavis is equally hostile to Romantic stirrings. 168 is in handling them’ (p. 98). She also says that ‘it is the indirect revelation of character either through conversation or action, or sometimes letters, that Miss Austen excels’ (p. 97). Contrary to how Leavis paints Spurgeon’s comments, then, Spurgeon seems perfectly aware that Austen’s dialogue is deceptively simple and that her wondrous prose is carefully crafted. Indeed, the two scholars even agree that Austen has a talent for seemingly effortless penmanship. Leavis says in the second article, for example, that her conversations and events are rarely gratuitous: ‘there are no loose ends, no padding, no characterization for its own sake’ (IIb p.127). Leavis and Spurgeon also use remarkably similar language to describe Austen’s style. Spurgeon calls Austen’s writing ‘pointed, terse and complete’ (p. 97); Leavis says it is ‘clear, pointed, concise’.46 So why, when Leavis agrees with Spurgeon in many respects, does she interpret her comment that Austen’s work is a ‘miracle’ as uncritical ‘worship’? If their critical analysis is almost identical in places, why does Spurgeon’s critical idiom stir up such hatred? It appears that, for Leavis, no amount of astute commentary excuses Spurgeon’s fantastic hyperbole. While unthoughtful, excessively emotional literary responses are a perennial preoccupation for her (in Fiction and the Reading Public, for example, she is gravely concerned that reading is ‘a form of the drug habit’ (p. 27)), the term ‘miracle’ particularly haunts Leavis. She uses it in all four parts of the ‘Critical Theory’ and returns to it again over ten years later, in an ‘Introduction’ to a 1958 edition of Sense and Sensibility.47 While Spurgeon and Leavis also share a belief that the novel deserves to be studied because it is popular, they view its popularity very differently. In Spurgeon’s first lecture on ‘The Rise and Development of the English Novel’, for instance, she says that

there is no form of literature the history of whose growth is so amazing in its rapidity, so extraordinary in its results & certainly none which can be of such personal interest to us as that of the English Novel.48

46 Q. D. Leavis, ‘A Critical Theory of Jane Austen’s Writings (IIa), Lady Susan into Mansfield Park’, in Collected Essays, Volume 1: The Englishness of the English Novel, ed. by G. S. Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 86-111 (p. 101). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text abbreviated as IIa. 47 Leavis mentions the ‘miracle’ on pages 75, 77, 79 of the first article and in the ‘Introduction’ to Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (London: Macdonald, 1958), reprinted in Q. D. Leavis, Collected Essays, Volume 1: The Englishness of the English Novel, ed. by G. S. Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 147. 48 Royal Holloway, University of London, RHC AR/130/1 Archives, Personal Papers of Caroline Spurgeon, PP7/3/1/21 ‘The Rise and Development of the English Novel’, p. 1. The notebook is undated: Spurgeon taught at Bedford College 1901-1939. 169

Whereas Spurgeon is not troubled by the novel’s rapid growth, in Fiction and the Reading Public, Leavis sees it as symptomatic of a societal deficiency. She describes novel readers as passive and susceptible to pack behaviour:

this body of writing has exerted an enormous influence upon the minds and lives of the English people; till recently [when cinema became more popular] it has superseded for the majority every other form of art and amusement; and it forms the only printed matter beside newspapers and advertisements which that majority reads; from the cultural point of view its importance cannot be exaggerated (p. xiii).

It is notable, though, that Spurgeon is not the reading public. She is not the impressionable, ordinary reader Leavis believes has been worn down by wage labour and commercial culture, but an upper-class, privately educated professor. Her hedonistic ‘worship’ is just as dangerous as the reading public’s so-called desire for a ‘comfortable state of mind’ (p. 27), though, because it demonstrates that literary academia is also degenerate. For Leavis, the problem with Spurgeon’s analysis is not that she reads bad fiction, but that she misreads good fiction. As a literary scholar, she should know better. An ‘appreciation’ of Austen’s technique is not enough; ‘hard work’ deserves hard ‘Theory’. Disregarding the gendered qualities of Spurgeon’s and Leavis’s critical diction for a moment, it is also important to ask how they fit with the texts in question. In other words, what does Austen herself have to say about emotional and personal reading? It is true that Austen’s heroines are usually rewarded for displaying ‘self-command’ (p. 38), like Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility (published 1811, probably begun in 1795), or ‘composure’, like Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice (published 1813, probably begun 1796-7).49 Conversely, characters who often express ‘rapturous delight’ (p. 17), like Marianne Dashwood, or have ‘high animal spirits’ (p. 45), like Lydia Bennett, have painful lessons to learn. Austen also uses immoderate reading to indicate a lack of emotional sense in places. In Sense and Sensibility, for example, Marianne bonds with the unsuitable suitor, Willoughby, because they both ‘idolized’ the same books in their youth and discuss them with ‘so rapturous a delight’.50 But Austen does not outlaw excessive emotion, in response to literature or romance, per se. In Spurgeon’s lecture, for example, she quotes the narrator of Northanger Abbey’s plea for intertextual and metafictional solidarity between women readers:

49 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. by R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford Clarendon Press, 1923), p. 192. Further references to this collection are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 50 Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (London: Penguin Popular Classics, 1994), p. 45. Further references to this collection are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 170

if the heroine of one novel be not patronised by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? […] ‘It is only a Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda [protagonists in eponymously titled novels by Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth]’; or in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language (pp. 86-7).

Not simply a call for loyalty and community among women, this passage also makes the case that narrative has the power to explore human nature and provoke laughter and joy at the same time. Using similarly bombastic superlatives to Spurgeon’s own, it invokes happiness and liveliness not necessarily as unconscious outbursts, but as expressing the irrepressible variety of human experience. Returning to Spurgeon’s original comment, we see that the scholarly approach Leavis abhors is specifically for canonical authors. Indeed, Spurgeon’s main claim in the lecture is that Austen deserves detailed study because people generally think that she is good. Significantly, before the offending ‘miracle’ comment, she calls Austen

a classic; which means, among other things, that every scrap of information we can gather, every ray of light that can be thrown upon her character, her outlook, her surroundings or her methods of work, are of intense and indeed of national importance (p. 81).

Then, with typically effusive Janeite enthusiasm, she adds that

Austen is more than a classic; she is also one of a little company—few, but very fit— whose work is of the nature of a miracle […]. That is to say, there is nothing whatever in the surroundings of these particular writers, their upbringing, opportunities or training, to account for the quality of their literary work (p. 83).

Spurgeon sees Austen’s work as miraculous because it is not explained by any obvious intellectual nurture. Yet, she also says that scholars have a duty to research a writer’s ‘character’, ‘outlook’, ‘surroundings’ and ‘methods of work’. For Leavis, this is contradictory. In the ‘Critical Theory’, she retorts that, in fact, ‘an enquiry into the nature of [Austen’s] genius and the process by which it developed can go very far indeed on sure ground’ (I p. 61). But Spurgeon does not doubt this; she also mentions research into ‘methods of work’. The problem for Leavis is, again, Spurgeon’s emotion and lack of gravity. What Leavis dislikes is the fact that Spurgeon is endorsing 171 biographical research regardless of whether it has any aesthetic explanatory power; simply for the fun of it.51 When Leavis argues that Austen cannot be read straightforwardly biographically, she uses, paradoxically, biographical sources. When arguing that the novels are the result of ‘thoroughly conscious, laborious, separate draftings’, for example, Leavis refers several times to Austen’s personal history. In the first article, Leavis looks at similarities between the early unfinished story The Watsons (written 1803-1805) and the late novel Emma (published 1815), in the second and third articles at the short epistolary tale Lady Susan (which Leavis believes Austen wrote in the 1790s) and Mansfield Park (published 1814), and in the fourth article at Austen’s letters.52 Leavis’s main textual evidence for her theory are what she believes to be ‘palimpsests’ (I p. 65) of epistolary origins. In the second article, for example, one such palimpsest is said to be the way that in Mansfield Park ‘[c]haracters are separated and distributed about the country for little other reason than that they may write to one another’ and, on one occasion, two letters report the same event, which she argues no writer would conceive of ‘voluntarily’ (IIa p. 95). Leavis astutely observes that the move from epistolary to direct narration affects the novel’s appeal to authenticity, sacrificing the plausibility of the storytelling for the roaming, intimate insights available to an omniscient narrator. But, perhaps surprisingly, she argues that these developments derive from Austen’s personal life. Leavis claims that Austen’s letters illustrate how her personal experience provides not only ‘raw material’ (I p. 80) for the novels, but also the psychological insights that teach her how to develop earlier drafts. Leavis says in the first essay, for example, that ‘there was ‘a poor Honey’ of a cousin’s wife with Isabella-ish characteristics at the right time [for developing The Watsons into Emma] (1813)’ (I p. 80) and that Austen’s niece Fanny Knight provided a model for Emma. In order to reassert the idea that Austen does not simply parrot what she hears, Leavis argues that her ‘genius lay not in creating but in using’ such raw material with ‘a thriftiness characteristic of our author’ (I p. 80). The perhaps surprising aspect of Leavis’s theory is that she reads narrative virtues in their creator. While one might anticipate that Spurgeon would claim Austen exhibits ‘reserve’, ‘self-control’, or ‘moderation in expression’ (p. 91), Leavis also believes Austen’s style indicates something about her character. In the second article, for example, she states that the writer has a ‘distinguished, acutely sharpened and highly disciplined

51 Spurgeon also uses biographical criticism in Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935), as I explore in chapter two. 52 Leavis follows Cassandra Austen’s timeline of her sister’s compositions. See I pp. 62-64. 172 mind’ (IIa p. 104).53 The difference between the two women’s analysis is not, as Leavis bemoans, its method, but how they feel about that method. While Spurgeon happily speculates about Austen’s personality, Leavis regrets that she must ‘drag in biography like this’, believing that it is ‘only justifiable in literary criticism either when it serves to illuminate strictly critical problems or when it helps to show how an artist works on raw material’ (IIa p. 93). But, if aesthetic qualities indicate authorial virtues, what is a ‘strictly critical’ problem? In the third article, Leavis mentions that critics often dismiss Mansfield Park because it ‘has many puzzling features’, a ‘marked unevenness in the tone of the narrative’, and a difference in the style’ (IIb p. 114). Leavis accounts for Mansfield Park’s defects with her main claim: that the text is reincarnation of an earlier work, in this case, Lady Susan. Leavis is willing to forgive Austen for failing to even out the narrative voice, for whatever reason, because it shows that the writer was continually developing her art. In order to save Austen’s novels from the charges that they are ‘infant wailings’, or amateurish scribbles, in other words, feminine, Leavis is willing to use biography. Here, a critical problem means evaluative in the most basic sense: whether the text is good or bad. But Leavis’s defence rests on different reasoning to Spurgeon’s, however. Whereas Leavis tries to prove Austen’s depth and nuance, Spurgeon suggests that levity might not in fact be a pejorative. That is to say: Leavis argues that Austen in fact fits academia’s criteria for good literature, it just hasn’t realised it yet, while Spurgeon ignores the detractors and extols the virtues of wonder.54 This argument requires her to employ the narrative of exceptionality that we see in various pioneers in chapter one. In the final article discussing ‘The Letters’, for example, Leavis claims that, whereas Austen carefully crafts her personal experience, ‘our knowledge of all other women novelists shows that the strength of their stories lies solely in being personal and reminiscent of the lives they saw around them, often closely autobiographical’ (my emphasis).55 Like many critics of the time, Leavis suggests that most, indeed, ‘all other’, women writers succumb to the temptation to simply disgorge their thoughts and feelings onto the page. As a result, she believes that their writing is ‘solely’ valuable for its content. Essentially, then, Leavis

53 Spurgeon also mentions self-restraint in the ‘Rise and Development of the English Novel’ lecture, saying that Austen ‘scarcely ever comments upon an incident […]. All of these decrees of the story teller J. A. entirely denied herself’ (p. 42). 54 We know from Spurgeon’s notebooks on Shakespeare’s Imagery and What it Tells Us that she read Richards’s article on ‘Science and Poetry’ when it was published in 1925, in which he outlines many of his theories about reading poetry being a process of controlling emotion, so when she gives the ‘Jane Austen’ lecture in 1927 she is cannot be unaware that ‘appreciation’ is falling out of fashion. See I. A. Richards, ‘Science and Poetry’, Atlantic Monthly, 136 (Oct. 1925), pp. 481-91; Folger Shakespeare Library, Personal Papers of Caroline Spurgeon, MS Add.347, S.d.79. 55 Q. D. Leavis, ‘A Critical Theory of Jane Austen’s Writings, III: The Letters’, in Collected Essays, Volume 3: The Novels of Religious Controversy, ed. by G. S. Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 130-147 (p. 138). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text abbreviated as III. 173 believes that Austen is a good woman writer because she doesn’t actually write very much like a woman. Spurgeon, on the other hand, sees women writers as vulnerable not to their own lack of self-control, but to their socio-political circumstances. Later in her lecture, she explains that Austen’s achievements are miraculous due to two particular contexts: because ‘the novel had sunk to its very lowest repute as a literary form’ when she was writing and because ‘she was a woman’ (pp. 83-4). In Spurgeon’s eyes, gender is an obstructive condition that society has placed upon her and her work and, therefore, Austen’s talent is exceptional because she transcends gendered constraints, not in spite of its gendered qualities. One might assume that, because Leavis speaks with the increasingly dominant diction of novel studies, her analysis would be treated with greater reverence than Spurgeon’s. While this is true, and very few critics have discussed Spurgeon’s lecture in recent times, Leavis’s critique has also often been dismissed.56 P. M. J. Robertson claims that the ‘Critical Theory’ may have gone virtually ‘unchallenged’ for around twenty years, but even within this period other Austen scholars overlooked it.57 Leavis writes to the TLS in 1948, for example, saying that R. W. Chapman’s forthcoming book echoes the ‘Critical Theory’ because it ‘‘hazards the guess’ that The Watsons ‘may be regarded as a trial sketch for Emma’’.58 Chapman replies in the next issue, saying that he ‘owes Dr Lewis [sic] an apology’ because he should have mentioned her ‘very able analysis’ of Mansfield Park but is ‘unable to accept many of her conclusions.’59 In a 1962 article, B. C. Southam also agrees with the general principle that Austen redrafts her novels extensively, but believes that Leavis’s specific claims about the origins of Mansfield Park and Emma are ‘largely hypothesis’ (CTR p. 21). This is because he sees no ‘external evidence’ (CTR p. 21) that Austen revised her drafts, such as manuscripts showing her editing process, or mentions of it in letters. Robertson points out, though, that in a 1970 book, Southam mimics Leavis’s language, stating that Austen’s novels “stand at the end of a long apprenticeship” of “laborious composition”, and

56 There are three brief mentions in recent scholarship: Kathryn Sutherland notes Spurgeon’s call for biographical research, Marina Cano discusses how Spurgeon uses nationalism, and Joan Wilkes mentions that Spurgeon likens Austen to Shakespeare. See Kathryn Sutherland, ‘Jane Austen and the invention of the serious modern novel’, in Thomas Keyner and John Mee, eds., The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 244-262; Marina Cano, ‘Early Re-Enactments’, in Jane Austen and Performance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 59-79; Joanne Wilkes, ‘Jane Austen as ‘Prose Shakespeare’: Early Comparisons’, in Marina Cano and Rosa García-Periago, eds., Jane Austen and William Shakespeare: A Love Affair in Literature, Film and Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 29-50. 57 P. M. J. Robertson, The Leavises on Fiction: An Historic Partnership (London: Macmillan, 1981), p. 53. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text abbreviated as LF. 58 Q. D. Leavis, Times Literary Supplement 4 Dec 1948, reprinted in Downing College Archive, DCPP/LEA/8/1, M. B. Kinch, ed., ‘More Letters in Criticism by F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis’, p. 69. 59 R. W. Chapman, Times Literary Supplement 18 Dec 1948, reprinted in Downing College Archive, DCPP/LEA/8/1, M. B. Kinch, ed., ‘More Letters in Criticism by F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis’, p. 69. 174

“highly-conscious experiment” (LF p. 55).60 Furthermore, whereas in 1962 Southam says that it is only ‘a possibility’ (CTR p. 23) that Pride and Prejudice had an epistolary origin, Robertson notes that in 1970 Southam now claims – like Leavis – that book was formerly a ‘novel in letters’ (IIa p. 95) and even describes it as “[his] theory” (LF p. 55). Robertson also points out that Southam states in the later piece that “had the Austen Papers [then held by R. W. Chapman] been available to Mrs Leavis, her claim to identification [between Eliza in Mansfield Park and Lady Susan] could have been stronger still” (LF p. 55). Somehow, Southam manages to dismiss Leavis’s ideas, then later adopt them, and sympathise with her plight, but claim her theory as his own. Thus, while Leavis appears to achieve her aim of elevating Austen into a respectable, hard-working writer, she still fails to receive due credit for her analysis. Southam’s language in another book, his 1968 Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, is also noteworthy, because it portrays Leavis with the same gendered diminutive terms from which she is trying to rescue Austen. Despite the pains Leavis takes to justify her biographical research, Southam calls the ‘Critical Theory’ merely ‘a kind of casual explanation’, because she ‘seeks to discuss the novels in the terms of their origin’ (CH p. 33). He continues:

There are no grounds for insisting that a theory of composition should be anterior to criticism. Any critical approach made today, utilizing our present, limited state of knowledge, can be safe and sufficiently grounded. Perhaps the strongest proof of this is to be found, paradoxically, in the critical theory itself, where Mrs. Leavis, if no “theorist”, shows herself, in analysis and incidental remarks, to be the keenest modern critic of Jane Austen (CH p. 33).

Strangely, even though Southam identifies that scholars often blight Austen with a gendered reputation for being ‘lightweight’, he dismisses Leavis’s criticism with similar terms, such as ‘casual’ and ‘incidental’, which connote amateurish and unintentional thinking. Yet, there is clearly nothing casual about Leavis’s ‘Critical Theory’, which she wrote in four parts, published over two years, and which addresses two novels, various letters, and many secondary sources. Thus, while Leavis shares Southam’s dislike of writing that is casual, accidental, feminine, she is still judged as a woman talking about another woman’s personal life. Unlike Leavis, Southam finds it unacceptable to ‘drag in biography’ even for ‘strictly critical problems’. In short, Leavis may invoke a masculine critical discourse, but she is still read as a woman.

60 Robertson is quoting from Brian C. Southam, Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). 175

Trained to Reproduce

What can Leavis and Spurgeon’s debate about Austen tell us, then, about the development of academic novel studies in the early twentieth century? At one illuminating moment in the ‘Critical Theory’, it appears as if Leavis has too succumbed to Austen’s beguiling magic. In the third article, she claims that

Emma, if one thinks only of the English novels that preceded it, is a dazzling achievement. Its author, entirely on her own and without the benefit of theory or of the practice of others, is seen to have somehow discovered the technique of Henry James (IIb p. 125, my emphasis).

The word ‘dazzling’ suggests that Leavis is blinded by a spectacle, curiously echoing both Spurgeon’s argument and diction. In relation to the development of novel studies, the most salient aspect of her remark is that what dazzles Leavis is free indirect speech. Leavis has explained before that the ‘technique’ she mentions here is: ‘how to convey through Emma’s consciousness, without any but implicit criticism, the whole of that subtle and complicated work’ (IIb p. 125). But Leavis seems to suggest that the chain of literary influence between James and Austen runs anachronistically. She rejects the idea that Austen is a ‘conjuror’ or a worker of miracles, yet makes her out to be a clairvoyant. Gifting her this supernatural power makes it sound as if she did not in fact create the technique, though, but borrowed James’s. In this section I argue that Leavis’s attitude towards Austen’s innovative narrative technique, free indirect speech, complements her hostility towards so-called excessive literary emotion. In order to contextualise Leavis’s feelings about free indirect speech, it is necessary to introduce two other figures into the discussion: Fanny Burney and Edith Morley. Morley, Spurgeon, and Leavis all argue that Fanny Burney is an integral predecessor to Austen. As I discuss earlier, Spurgeon quotes references in Northanger Abbey to Burney’s novels Cecilia and Camilla. She also discusses them at length in the Bedford College lecture. Leavis argues that Austen attempts to ‘rewrite the story’ of Burney’s novels ‘in realistic terms’ (Cecilia) or ‘with the everyday equivalent’ (Evelina) (I pp. 71-2). Edith Morley explores Burney’s work further in a 1925 pamphlet for the English Association. Like Spurgeon’s evaluation of Austen, though, Morley’s appraisal of Burney’s work is notably different to Leavis’s. Whereas Morley and Spurgeon both see Burney’s novels as radical early deponents of women’s domestic lives, Leavis considers them to be ridiculously affected set-pieces. Morley says, for example, that Burney gives an unprecedented glimpse of ‘the feminine point of view’ (p. 16) and Spurgeon calls Evelina (1778) 176

‘the 1st novel of domestic satire, fr[om]: woman’s p[oin]t of view’ and an excellent ‘picture of soc[iet]y of the time’ (p. 34). Both Spurgeon and Morley emphasise transparency and veracity: Spurgeon says that Burney is ‘holding the mirror up to her times’ (p. 44); Morley says that while Burney was employed as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Charlotte she was ‘singularly well fitted’ to re-enact political events because, as a novelist, she was ‘trained to reproduce what she sees and hears’ (p. 9). In contrast, Leavis says in the ‘Critical Theory’ that Austen creates authentic versions of Cecilia (1782), for example, in which ‘the moral situation is exquisitely burlesqued and the incredibly unrealistic tone […] is brought down with a jolt to the level of stage comedy’ (I p. 71). How can these women regard the same narratives so differently? I want to argue that the three scholars do not necessarily see different qualities in women’s fictions, they simply give them different amounts of import. When discussing Austen’s letters, for example, Leavis returns to the argument that biographical sources show that Austen is a self-conscious crafter. She claims that if Austen’s fictional worlds seem limited, then that is because they are so by design:

Nor, after reading the Letters, can we fall into the common error of believing her to have lived the life of the country parsonage cut off from society and knowledge of the great world. […] To ascribe the lack of dramatic incident in the novels to the author’s humdrum experience and confined outlook is clearly wrong; the novels are limited in scope and subject by deliberate intention (III pp. 134-8).

Spurgeon and Morley, however, argue that Austen’s and Burney’s worlds aren’t in fact ‘limited’; they are simply different to other writers’. They are domestic, romantic, feminine worlds. Whereas Leavis believes that Burney’s novels contain ‘preposterous conventions about female behaviour’ (I pp. 71-2), Morley views these same conventions as ‘commonplaces’ now finally illustrated for all to see:

who could have been interested in a girl’s sensations when she first had her hair ‘dressed’, i.e. powdered, for a dance; or when she quaked at her first introduction to society, or made the ignorant mistake of a country miss and suffered their awkward consequences? (pp. 15-16).

While Morley petitions readers to try to understand eighteenth-century novels’ ‘extreme ‘sensibility’’ and ‘extravagance in feeling’, because they were ‘a real attribute and an admired attribute of the women of their time’ (p. 17), Leavis believes that such ‘morbid delicacy’ is easy to ‘ridicule’ (I p. 70). Leavis thus singles out feminine sensibility and conventionality as particularly improbable. 177

When Leavis ridicules delicacy, she anticipates The Great Tradition’s proclamation that great novels have a ‘reverent openness’ and ‘marked moral intensity’, and promote ‘human awareness’ (p. 2). In the first article of the ‘Critical Theory’, for example, Leavis claims that one of the signs of Austen’s maturity as a writer is that she superimposes the simplistic moral binary of ‘Sense versus Sensibility’ in Elinor and Marianne with ‘a theme of deeper import’ – ‘candour’ (I p. 85, quoting Sense and Sensibility). Yet, by doing so, Leavis superimposes her own binary.61 It is fair to say that the novels published earlier, Sense and Sensibility (published 1811, probably begun in 1795) and Pride and Prejudice (published 1813, probably begun 1796) tend to stage moral conflicts embodied by separate characters (like sensible Elinor Dashwood and sensitive Marianne, or cautious Elizabeth Bennett, sentimental Jane, and spirited Lydia), while later protagonists have more ambivalent relationships with caution and sentimentality (such as Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, published 1814, and the eponymous Emma, published 1815). But I would argue that Austen’s work presents a subtly different moral summit. In Emma, for example, good character depends on successful social interpretation, not on one individual’s self-awareness or honesty. When the heroine finally admits her affections for Mr Knightley, the narrative tells the reader directly that this is a rare moment when ‘complete truth is known between people’, because Emma’s ‘feelings […] show through her conduct’ (p. 326). In other words, romance causes one’s internal life to align with one’s external behaviour. But much of the humour in Austen’s novels derives from the ways in which people’s feelings do not ‘show through’ their conduct; from misunderstandings, faux pas, and delicate attempts to discern someone else’s intentions without detection. As Morley explains, socially cohesive kinds of insincerity, such as politeness or diplomacy, were ‘a real attribute’ to women navigating intricate social rituals and courtships. The protagonist of Burney’s novel, Evelina, who at beginning of the novel is said to ‘have an air of inexperience and innocency’, later declares that ‘there ought to be a book, of the laws and customs à-la-mode, presented to all young people upon their first introduction into public company’.62 In contrast, The Great Tradition suggests that morality cannot be learned and that any disconnect between a person’s actions and feelings is deeply suspicious. The footnotes to the introductory chapter say that whereas Lord David Cecil, a Janeite, claims that Austen’s personal moral code of ‘truthfulness and chastity and industry and self-restraint’ (p. 13) is too visible in the novels, these are in fact admirable qualities for a writer. This is because, apparently, ‘the

61 Leavis claims that Austen never reconciles herself fully to ‘sense’ or ‘sensibility’ but is ‘arguing with herself’ (I p. 86) right up to her death. 62 Frances Burney, Evelina (London: Penguin English Library, 2012), pp. 23, 97. 178 enlightenment or aestheticism or sophistication that feels an amused superiority’ over such qualities leads to ‘triviality and boredom, and that out of triviality comes evil’ (p. 14). Anything less than utter truthfulness is morally reprehensible and potentially even dangerous. Q. D. Leavis again pre-empts The Great Tradition’s stance here. In a letter to the Times Literary Supplement a few years after the ‘Critical Theory’, she suggests that it is unfortunate that manners are no indication of morality. Describing Austen’s work as preoccupied with ‘moral issues, expressed if you like in manners’, she implies that behaviour and intention are separable and, with the casual concession, ‘if you like’, conveys the impression that she is not especially keen on this fact.63 How one assesses ‘candour’ or ‘complete truth’ in a literary character is, of course, intrinsically related to narrative technique. Direct narration’s claim to authenticity operates precisely by veiling intention, withholding special insights, so that the reader sees characters as if they are also in the fictional world and therefore only able to judge others by their words and actions. But what Leavis finds dazzling is the fact that Austen bends the rules, ventriloquizing characters’ viewpoints without acknowledging that she is doing so with speech marks or asides. I agree with Daniel P. Gunn, then, that to describe Austen’s technique as ‘“objective” narration, aiming to present characters truthfully, authentically, as Leavis appears to, is ‘inadequate and misleading’.64 Gunn proposes, instead, that, given that direct narration deliberately adopts a specific voice like any other kind, that the phrase ‘narratorial mimicry’ (p. 35) might better convey how Austen reproduces characters’ perspectives and thoughts. This is evident even when Marianne begins to speak with ‘candour’ (p. 366) in Sense and Sensibility. When the narrator says that she now makes ‘calm and sober judgements’ (p. 372), for example, it still interweaves her former exuberance:

She was born to overcome an affection formed so late in life as at seventeen, and with no sentiment superior to strong esteem and lively friendship, voluntarily to give her hand to another!—and that other, a man who had suffered no less than herself under the event of a former attachment,—whom two years before, she had considered too old to be married,—and who still sought the constitutional safeguard of a flannel waistcoat! (p. 372).

The sentences with multiple interjecting clauses, broken with heavy punctuation, mimic Marianne’s internal self-revelation, documenting it for the reader in her own mental real-time.

63 Q. D. Leavis, ‘Jane Austen’s Religion’, Times Literary Supplement, 19 February 1944, reprinted in Downing College Archive, DCPP/LEA/8/2, ‘Letters to John Tasker’, p. 63. 64 Daniel P. Gunn, ‘Free Indirect Discourse and Narrative Authority in “Emma”’, Narrative, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Jan., 2004), 35-54 (p. 35). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 179

The surprised exclamation marks and italics – the surprise that Marianne would commit herself to another person, and to a person with questionable fashion choices, nonetheless – is her own, not the narrator’s. To contemporary readers of Austen, accustomed to epistolary fiction, a new unidentifiable storyteller who somehow knew the characters intimately enough to see inside their head must have seemed truly miraculous. What Leavis appears to assume is that one can either enjoy the trick or know that one is being tricked, one cannot do both. Yet, as D. A. Miller notes, Austen’s technique refuses to relinquish either possibility:

In the paradoxical form of an impersonal intimacy, [free indirect speech] grants us at one and the same time the experience of a character’s inner life as she herself lives it, and an experience of the same inner life as she never could. Though the irony that thus always accompanies free indirect speech necessarily severs the identification with character, it nonetheless still presupposes it as one of its terms.65

That is to say: the reader indulges in free indirect speech with Austen precisely because it is impossible; because we wish we could read minds and hear other people’s gossip. In Sense and Sensibility, the irony of this fact is endearing. Immediately before Marianne speaks with candour, we are told that Colonel Brandon’s affection had ‘burst on’ her, yet had been long ‘observable to everybody else’ (p. 372). When the narrative voice disappears in the passage quoted above, then, it does so not to reveal a truth, but allows the reader the wry pleasure of witnessing a character discover a truth we already know. Austen’s narrative candour is not always an argument for unswerving honesty, as Leavis suggests, but a pleasurable affect of reading. For Morley, theatrical dialogue is a key part of Austen’s feminine inheritance. As I mention earlier, she claims that because Fanny Burney is a writer, she is therefore adeptly ‘trained to reproduce’ her life experiences, but she also emphasises that Burney ‘does not merely transcribe; she views reality through the medium of her own emotions and personality’ (p. 16). As far as Morley is concerned, it is not contradictory that Burney ‘dramatizes her characters’ by reporting their ‘speech, manners, and actions rather than their thoughts and deeper motives’ (p. 17). Whereas Leavis sees directly repeating speech as a sign of truth and authenticity, Morley sees it as part of the spectacle of narrative. As Gunn argues, narratorial transparency is always a kind of trick; it simply mimics a different voice. According to Morley, bringing characters to life at the surface is Burney’s key innovation, saying that ‘there is nothing in Richardson or Fielding, Sterne or Smollett to equal [Burney’s] admirable conversation pieces’ (p. 14). Indeed, she constructs an

65 D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, Or, The Secret of Style (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 60. 180 entirely different tradition to Ian Watt or F. R. Leavis, claiming that ‘[t]he writing down of [women’s] trivialities marks a new era in the history of the novel, a new genre in fiction altogether’ (p. 16) and that Austen and Burney ‘[t]aken together […] form a brilliant achievement’ (p. 3). Deviating significantly from the Leavisian tradition, Morley places Austen and Burney in their own canon and defines it by the feminine aspects of their work: quotidian subject matter and implicit characterisation. Like Spurgeon, she argues that these women write good novels precisely because they dare to depict feminine worlds. Unlike the writer of The Great Tradition, neither Morley nor Spurgeon see emotional excess or social superficiality as some kind of feminine subterfuge, designed to dupe the reader; they see the ability to distinguish morality from manners as a crucial part of an eighteenth-century woman’s social repertoire.66 As mime artist, conjuror, or miracle-worker, they are happy to suspend their disbelief to enjoy Austen’s illusions. As elsewhere in this project, I want to propose that the way literary academia redeems the status of the novel is by changing its gendered associations, by transitioning from leisurely reading, sentimental fiction, and biographical criticism, towards laborious reading, candid narratives, and serious criticism. Undoubtedly, there are critics in the days of the Janeites who dislike Austen, such as Garrod, and admirers of sentimentality in the 1940s.67 But the work I discuss in this chapter suggests that the general culture shift is visible before The Great Tradition, in Leavis’s ‘Critical Theory’ several years earlier. Of course, The Great Tradition had a much wider influence than the ‘Critical Theory’; its treatise of ‘reverent openness’, ‘moral intensity’, and ‘human awareness’ razed to the ground late Victorian ‘aestheticism or sophistication’ and its evil ‘triviality and boredom’. What I want to highlight by discussing this rhetoric is that it catches early women scholars, even Q. D. Leavis, in the collateral. Even though F. R. Leavis is credited with inaugurating the anti-sentimental tradition, it is Q. D. Leavis who first declares that the age of literary ‘miracles’ is over.

66 One can see a recent turn towards textual ‘surface’ in, for example, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s work. They say: ‘The surface is associated with the superficial and deceptive, with what can be perceived without close examination and, implicitly, would turn out to be false upon closer scrutiny. The manifest has more positive connotations, as what is truthful, obvious, and clearly revealed.’ Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations, Vol. 108, No. 1 (Fall 2009), 1-21 (p. 4). 67 Q. D. Leavis’s colleague at Girton, Enid Welsford, apparently encouraged her students to read novels because, ‘[i]n Leavisian times’, some members of the English department ‘held that life was too short to read Fielding’. Edward Shils and Carmen Blacker, eds., Cambridge Women: Twelve Portraits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 210. 181

A Great Tradition?

So far in this chapter, I have looked at how Q. D. Leavis’s theories on Austen share a critical idiom with The Great Tradition. In this final section, I attempt to expand the terms of the Leavises’ affiliation, using biographical sources and stylistic comparisons to assess what direct influence Q. D. might have had on the creation of The Great Tradition. The catalyst for this enquiry is her own claim in 1981 that she contributed to the book. Just after Q. D.’s death, The Times printed an addendum to Boris Ford’s obituary, in which Ford quotes a letter he received from Leavis a few months previously. In this letter, she claims that she played a significant part in writing the book that would go on to become an early cornerstone of English novel studies. Ford quotes Leavis saying in the letter: ‘[I was] pushed out of The Great Tradition, which was my undertaking, and great parts of which, besides all the first chapter and all the footnotes, I personally wrote’.68 F. R. Leavis does give her the customary credit, saying in the ‘Acknowledgements’ that he owes an ‘immeasurable indebtedness […] in every page’, but this did not satisfy her. In her autobiography, Storm Jameson quotes Leavis referring in 1948 to The Great Tradition as her ‘husband’s, or should I say our book on the English novel’ and claiming: ‘I wrote a good deal of it myself, perhaps you can identify some’.69 Robertson mentions that she also told the Cambridge Evening News in 1978: ‘I actually wrote in large parts without acknowledgement’.70 Various scholars have debated her claims, including Nicholas Tredell, Ian MacKillop, and John Carey, but none of them discuss the ‘Critical Theory’. Only Robertson believes that ‘Mrs. Leavis actually wrote into The Great Tradition, having the ideas, the breadth of reading that produced them, and the facility to write them in’ (QC p. 147).71 While there is not scope in this chapter to assess the entire book, I want to look at the part she singles out for mention to Ford, the first chapter, which is also the chapter that outlines the tradition. Indeed, this chapter, more than any other, is invested in what Johnson calls the ‘idea and practice’ of canonising novels. There are several reasons to believe that Q. D.’s claims are at least somewhat truthful. She studied the novel more extensively than F. R., she introduced him to Eliot and James, the first chapter features Austen (her specialism) prominently, there is evidence of her syntax and

68 Boris Ford, ‘Mrs Q. D. Leavis’, The Times, 26 March 1981, p. 16. 69 Storm Jameson, Journey from the North (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 643. 70 Q. D. Leavis, Cambridge Evening News, April 18, 1978, quoted in P. M. J. Robertson, ‘Queen of Critics: The Achievement of Q. D. Leavis (1906-1981)’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Winter, 1983), 141-150 (p. 141). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text abbreviated as QC. 71 In his book on the Leavises, he is rather dismissive of the ‘Critical Theory’, saying that ‘critical insights […] crop up only incidentally’ (LF p. 59). 182 ample use of footnotes, and, most significantly for my argument in this chapter, her earlier work makes connections between some of the ‘great’ novelists. To begin at the beginning, I want to first outline the rather haphazard composition of The Great Tradition. Ian MacKillop explains that the book is mostly comprised of articles F. R. Leavis had previously published in Scrutiny. MacKillop quotes F. R. writing to Gordon Cox in 1946, for instance, saying that after he finished ‘the last and monstrous instalment of George Eliot’ (published as ‘Revaluations XV’), he found that he ‘had a book written’.72 Leavis says that, then: ‘I devoted the rest of the [summer] vacation to putting that together – The Great Tradition: George Eliot, James and Conrad. I had to write a long opening chapter to justify the title’ (p. 252). But MacKillop doubts this version of events. He claims that ‘from the summer of 1946’, F. R. was ‘working back to back with Q.D.L.’ on the same material: ‘[h]er review of a collection of James stories and his review of Mathiessen’s Henry James: The Major Phase both appeared in Scrutiny (Spring 1947)’ (pp. 252-3). The introductory chapter was therefore crucial to weave together the connections between the writers and formulate the ‘tradition’. If both Leavises claim to have written the first chapter, though, how can we distinguish which claim is correct? Before turning to the introductory chapter, I want to plant the suggestion that Q. D. may have influenced the main chapters of The Great Tradition, too. Building on my work in the previous chapters concerning intellectual encouragement, I want to raise the possibility that F. R. may never have read Eliot, James, and Conrad if Q. D. hadn’t encouraged him to. In the memoir, quoted by G. S. Singh, she says that when she met F. R., his library contained ‘no books for children, fairy-tales, folk-lore, or books by female writers, like George Eliot and Mrs Gaskell’ and ‘no Henry James’.73 In a 1947 review of James’s short stories, she says, however, that during her childhood James ‘lay around the house’.74 As I mention in chapter one, Q. D. claims that she ‘introduced’ F. R. to the ‘Gwendolen Harleth’ part in Daniel Deronda. Singh also quotes her making a further claim:

72 Ian MacKillop, F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism (London: Allen Lane, 1995), p. 252. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 73 Singh quotes from the memoir in his Literary Biography of F. R. Leavis and his Critical Study of Q. D. Leavis. G. S. Singh, F. R. Leavis: A Literary Biography, with Q. D. Leavis’s “Memoir” of F. R. Leavis (London: Duckworth, 1995), p. 27. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text abbreviated as LB. G. S. Singh, A Critical Study of Q. D. Leavis’s Published and Unpublished Writings (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text abbreviated as CS. 74 Q. D. Leavis, ‘Review of ‘Fourteen Stories by Henry James, by David Garnett and Henry James’, Scrutiny, 14 (Spring 1947), 223-228 (p. 228). 183

I then introduced him to my copy of Henry James’s Partial Portraits in which James’s conversation piece about Deronda appeared, until at my suggestion he reprinted it entire in The Great Tradition (p. 11).

It is notable that Leavis says she introduces her husband to her ‘copy’ of James’s work, not to the work or James himself. As Morley’s mother models reading, or as libraries encourage browsing, Q. D. influences her husband passively, presenting him with material and offering hints and markers, but not necessarily dictating how texts should be read. But the fact that she can guide him towards these classic novels highlights the breadth and depth of her knowledge of the form. The ways she describes F. R.’s approach to the novel as a form, in contrast, suggests that he did not have the same automatic enthusiasm. Singh notes, for example, that Q. D. says:

“Whereas [F. R. Leavis] examined the entire output of any poet who interested him, on whatever grounds and of whatever period, he did not, as I thought necessary, read or at least look through the entire oeuvre of a novelist” (LB p. 27).

Indeed, F. R. wrote very little on the novel in his early career, whereas Q. D. was preoccupied with it during her PhD and throughout her entire career. On this basis, then, one could argue that Q. D. has the single most important influence on The Great Tradition, by introducing the critic to the texts. But, of course, two intellectuals working in the same house and editing and writing for the same publication would inevitably exchange ideas. What I wish to question is the idea that F. R. was the ‘ideas’ man and Q. D. was his intellectual accomplice, that the vector of influence ran mainly in one direction. In the introductory chapter, there are further signs of her input. MacKillop argues, for example, that mentions of Charles Dickens echo her assessments in Fiction and the Reading Public and Scrutiny articles.75 Q. D.’s work also anticipates references peppered through the introductory chapter to critics of the novel such as Edmund Gosse (pp. 18, 23) and E. M. Forster (p. 23).76 Several critics even agree with Q. D.’s claim that she wrote the footnotes. MacKillop says that the ‘crisp footnotes in the finished book do have her touch’ (p. 255) and Robertson says that they ‘reflect the fact that she would always approach a subject with ‘an impressive apparatus of notes, appendices and literary influences and parallels’ (LF p. 71). The footnotes are indeed remarkably long, as they are in Q. D.’s other work; on several pages, such as

75 MacKillop mentions that Fiction and the Reading Public states: ‘Dickens stands primarily for a set of crude emotional exercises’ (p. 156), while The Great Tradition says: ‘The adult mind doesn’t as a rule find in Dickens a challenge to an unusual and sustained seriousness’ (p. 19). 76 She mentions Gosse, for example, in her 1938 review of Woolf’s Three Guineas and in Fiction and the Reading Public (p. 189) and Forster in Fiction and the Reading Public (p. 5) and the ‘Critical Theory’ (III p. 105). Q. D. Leavis, ‘Caterpillars of the Commonwealth, Unite!’, Scrutiny, 7, No. 2 (Sept., 1938), 203-214 (p. 203). 184 on page six, the footnotes are actually longer than the main body of the text.77 They also often reference other critics of the novel and other novelists such as Sterne, Bunyan, and Defoe:

Associated with this use of Defoe is the use that was made in much the same milieu of Sterne, in whose irresponsible (and nasty) trifling, regarded as in some way extraordinarily significant and mature, was found a sanction for attributing value to other trifling. […] It is a mark of the genuine nature of Mr. Powys's creative gift (his work seems to me not to have had due recognition) that he has been able to achieve a kind of traditional relation to Bunyan […] And yet we know [Bunyan] to have been for two centuries one of the most frequented of all classics, and in such a way that he counts immeasurably in the English-speaking consciousness (p. 2).

The familiarity with early novelists here chimes with Q. D.’s discussions elsewhere, such as in the ‘Critical Theory’ and Fiction and the Reading Public.78 She also mentions contemporary British novelist T. F. Powys far more frequently than F. R., including six times in Fiction and the Reading Public alone.79 P. M. J Robertson believes that these echoes ‘would undoubtedly have confirmed [that Q. D. wrote], if not inspired, the famous footnote’ (QC p. 145). I am inclined to agree. There are several familiar syntactical elements in this passage, too. Most notably, Q. D. often intervenes between the subject and object of a main clause to provide additional information, such as in the sentence: ‘we know him to have been for two centuries one of the most frequented of all classics’ (my emphasis). She also tends to divide the subject and object with parentheses, as in the aside: ‘(his work seems to me not to have had due recognition)’. The phrase ‘it is […] that’ in the passage quoted above and the use of infinitives, such as ‘to have been’ and ‘to have had’, are also familiar. Compare, for example, a sentence from the first article of the ‘Critical Theory’, which interjects between the main clause’s subject and object with such long, multi-clausal asides that she restates the original beginning (and also refers to ‘trifles’):

It is this power of seizing on every trifle at her command, whether drawn from nature or literature (as we shall see, they were of about equal authority for her) and making it serve a complex purpose, using it in the one place and context where it will tell and do exactly what is required of it—it is this kind of ability that constitutes her genius, rather than any more mysterious and inexplicable quality (I p. 68, my emphasis).

77 See III p. 113, for example. 78 See I p. 70, for example. 79 See pp. 5, 60, 76, 76, 210, 242, 265. I have not been able to find any mentions of Powys in F. R.’s Scrutiny articles, which are available online, but have been unable to search all of his earlier publications, which only exist in print form. 185

These syntactic features all suggest Q. D. had a hand in composing the introductory chapter. But there are traces of F. R.’s voice, too. The sentences beginning with ‘And…’ on page ten, for example, suggest his penmanship: ‘And except for Jane Austen there was no novelist to learn from none whose work had any bearing on her own essential problems as a novelist […] And there is for him George Eliot as well, coming between’. Q. D. very rarely begins with a conjunction, using ‘And’ only on odd occasions, such as in the ‘Introduction’ to Fiction and the Reading Public: ‘And for this purpose it is at least as important to take account of the fiction that does not happen to be, or to have become, literature…’ (xiv); and in the ‘Critical Theory’: ‘And this is precisely what we have in the last chapter of Mansfield Park…’ (II p. 123). By comparison, in F. R.’s first ‘Revaluation’ of George Eliot, practically every page contains a sentence beginning with a conjunction: ‘And there is something like a unanimity…’ (p. 172); ‘And the reader may note that…’ (p. 173); ‘And it is her greatness we are concerned with’ (p. 174), etc.. The statements on page ten are thus surely F. R.’s handiwork. There are also sections featuring a first-person pronoun, usually to tell a personal anecdote, which I would venture that F. R. Leavis authors. The authorial voice refers, for example, to personal research (‘I finally tracked it down to Lord David Cecil’s Early Victorian Novelists’, p. 5), a conversation with French academic Andre Chevrillon (p. 17), and later on mentions that they last read D. H. Lawrence fifteen years ago (p. 27). While it may seem implausible that Q. D. would ventriloquise these events, it is still possible that she wrote these parts in the sense that she may well have typed while F. R. dictated or have edited the final sequence of words. As I discuss in chapter one, she and her daughter both claim that she edited all of F. R.’s work and made suggestions as she went, so she was surely able to adopt his ‘voice’. Indeed, as I explore in that chapter, many secretaries throughout history have deftly absorbed their employer’s or husband’s voice to then regurgitate onto the page.80 Indeed, I would argue that it is even possible that Q. D. Leavis developed a ‘Q. D.’ voice and an ‘F. R.’ voice; that she was capable of precisely the same ‘narratorial mimicry’ as Austen. Even with annotated, edited manuscripts of the Leavises’ work, it would be practically impossible to know who conceived of what, because we will never know who said what to whom. Thus, while there are sections in the introductory chapter where one voice is stronger, there is little consistency, and, in any case, it is impossible to know for sure to whom the voices belong.81 Therefore, the syntactical evidence

80 See, for example, Bette London, Writing Double: Women’s Literary Partnerships (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999). 81 On an anecdotal note, I find that when I read the chapter the author I imagine in my mind shifts back and forth between the two Leavises. I suddenly realise that my mental impression has shifted and find that the sentences contain 186 arguably discredits both Q. D. and F. R.’s claim to sole authorship; we cannot say that Q. D. definitely wrote the first chapter of The Great Tradition, but we cannot say that F. R. definitely wrote it either. But even if Q. D. did write parts of The Great Tradition, was the ‘tradition’ itself not F. R.’s invention? What is striking about the tradition, though, is that it is somewhat unclear who it actually comprises. While the book begins with the statement ‘[t]he great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad’ (p. 1), the last lines of the first chapter add another writer to the line-up, saying: ‘Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence: the great tradition of the English novel is there’ (p. 27, emphasis in the original). But it is difficult to see exactly where the tradition lies. The book contains no chapter on Austen or Lawrence, but does include a short coda on Charles Dickens, who the first chapter briefly mentions towards the end. As Claudia Johnson points out, ‘the tradition that Leavis put together is odd’ (ENJP p. 202), too. It is certainly difficult to draw substantial comparisons between some members of this slightly motley crew, such as the outliers Austen and Conrad, or between James and Dickens. As F. R. never wrote on Austen or Burney, it seems more likely that Q. D. had a significant if not direct influence over the first half of the first chapter. But the second half seems more in keeping with F. R’s other work, reflecting the interest in Dickens and Lawrence he takes up later in D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (1956) and Dickens the Novelist (1970). Like the syntax, the tradition appears to be the product of two different minds. MacKillop proposes that the reason the first chapter has a rather clumsy, composite character is because the Leavises intended to collaborate, but Q. D.’s health prohibited her from keeping pace with the project. MacKillop argues that Q. D.’s articles on Austen were supposed to complement F. R.’s and become another chapter, which had been ‘silently assumed to cover the first member of the [first] line [of the book]’ (p. 251). He speculates that the book was only finally published two years after completion because F. R. was ‘waiting for contributions from Q.D.L., so this could become a joint book’ (p. 258). Q. D. herself mentions in the 1948 letter to the TLS that she ‘should long ago have finished the book of which the articles form part’.82 She almost certainly struggled to complete either a chapter or a book on Austen because she had been

one of the stylistic quirks I mention above, but the image only cements briefly; the impressions flip back and forth throughout the chapter. 82 Q. D. Leavis, Times Literary Supplement, 4 Dec 1948, reprinted in Downing College Archive, DCPP/LEA/8/1, M. B. Kinch, ed., ‘More Letters in Criticism by F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis’, p. 69. 187 diagnosed with breast cancer in 1944.83 Austen’s place in the first line is therefore perhaps, like the letters in Mansfield Park, a palimpsest of an earlier, aborted version. The ‘Critical Theory’ does make its way into the introductory chapter in several places, though. The footnotes on page five, for example, reference it and there are various echoes of its analysis. The first chapter tells us, for example, that Austen is ‘intelligent and serious enough to be able to impersonate her moral tensions as she strives, in her art, to become more fully conscious of them’ (p. 7, my emphasis) and, later, that ‘the formal perfection’ of Emma is not simply an ‘aesthetic matter’, but is ‘miraculously’ combined with ‘truth to life’ (p. 8, my emphasis). The chapter also implies, like the ‘Critical Theory’, that Austen can subvert literary chronology:

her relation to tradition is a creative one. She not only makes tradition for those coming after, but her achievement has for us a retroactive effect: as we look back beyond her we see in what goes before (p. 5).

We hear that Austen is the ‘first great modern novelist’ (p. 3) and that ‘one of the important lines of English literary history’ is ‘Richardson – Fanny Burney – Jane Austen’ (p. 4). Indeed, the writer compares her to Fanny Burney more often than James or Conrad and devotes several pages to Burney herself (pp. 4-5). Ten of the first chapter’s twenty-seven pages discuss Austen—more than any of the writers in the chapters that follow. In short, Austen’s central position in this chapter is not consistent with her absence in the rest of the book. The extensive footnotes in the first seven or eight pages suggest, too, that the writer of the first chapter has more to say than time or space will allow. If, as MacKillop says, the Scrutiny articles became the later chapters of The Great Tradition, then we also need to turn the clock back further and look at how the Leavises’ idea may have cross-pollinated at that point. Looking in Scrutiny, we find that F. R. Leavis writes his first article on a protagonist from The Great Tradition, Henry James, in 1937 and then writes two ‘Revaluations’ of Joseph Conrad in June and October 1941.84 There is no mention of Eliot or Conrad in the James piece and there is only a brief comparison with James in the second Conrad piece: ‘Conrad’s London bears something of the same kind of relation to Dickens as Henry James’s does in The Princess Casamassima’ (p. 166). It is not until F. R. Leavis writes the four

83 Leavis wrote in the 1948 letter to Storm Jameson that she ‘develops a cancer at the age of thirty-eight’, which, as she was born in 1906, makes the diagnosis 1944. Downing College Archive, DCPP/LEA/8/1, M. B. Kinch, ed., ‘More Letters in Criticism by F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis’, Letter to Storm Jameson, November 1948, p. 33. 84 F. R. Leavis, ‘Henry James’, Scrutiny, 5 (March 1937), 398-417; F. R. Leavis, ‘Revaluations (XIV): Joseph Conrad (I)’, Scrutiny, 9 (June 1941), 22-50; F. R. Leavis, ‘Revaluations (XIV): Joseph Conrad (concluded)’, Scrutiny, 10 (October 1941), 157-181. 188

‘Revaluations’ of George Eliot in 1945 that he makes any connection between Eliot, James, and Conrad. In the first article, Leavis says:

In her own language [Eliot] ranks with Jane Austen and Conrad, both of whom, in their different ways, present sharp contrasts with her. To take Conrad first: there is no novelist of whom it can more fitly be said that his figures and situations are seen, and James would have testified to his intense and triumphant preoccupation with ‘form’ (pp. 173-4).85

The other articles on Eliot mention James frequently (following James’s own assessment of her influence), but does not mention Conrad.86 In the years between these two ‘Revaluations’, Q. D. Leavis writes the ‘Critical Theory’ on Jane Austen. In the third part, published in early 1942, she states:

Jane Austen was not a poet, least of all a poet like Coleridge, but a novelist like Henry James and Joseph Conrad, who had a very high degree of awareness of the origin and adaptations of their material, and who took an intense interest in the deliberate shaping of their novels (IIb:127, my emphasis).

Before this date, F. R. only links Conrad and James. After this, he links Eliot with Conrad and Austen, and, fleetingly, as her critic, James. While of course we cannot know how the threads of the tradition came together, we can say that the first person to publicly link James, Conrad, and Austen is Q. D. Leavis. Furthermore, she does more than consider writers alongside each other. While discussing two writers is a comparison; three is the beginning of a tradition. The other important thing to note is that, for Q. D., this tradition features Austen. There is another moment where Q. D. credits Austen with engendering a tradition. In a 1938 article on George Gissing, she writes:

It is an important link in the line of novels from Jane Austen's to the present which an adult can read at his utmost stretch-as attentively, that is, as good poetry demands to be read-instead of having to make allowances for its being only a novel or written for a certain public or a certain purpose. In the nineteenth century, to take the highlights, Jane Austen, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, The Egoist, New Grub Street connect the best eighteenth-century tradition with the serious twentieth-century tradition that Henry James, Conrad, Lawrence, Forster, Joyce and Mrs Woolf have built up.87

85 F. R. Leavis, ‘Revaluations (XV): George Eliot (I)’, Scrutiny, Issue 13, No. 3 (Autumn 1945), 172-8 (pp. 173-4). 86 Henry James, ‘The Novels of George Eliot’, Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 18 (Oct. 1866), 479-492. 87 Q. D. Leavis, ‘Gissing and the English Novel’, Scrutiny, 7 (1938), 73-81 (pp.79-80). Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 189

The line-up does not match The Great Tradition’s, but all the main figures are present. Most importantly for my argument here, Austen is integral to the list. She also makes early connections between these novelists in Fiction and the Reading Public. After Leavis makes the claim I quote earlier that novels can be both good and inconsistent, she adds that ‘George Eliot, Conrad, and Hardy, to take notable instances, are guilty of all this and yet are serious and important novelists’ (p. 213, my emphasis). She doesn’t explain what makes them important; she says that they are simply typical novelists because their narratives can accommodate dull spells and still be great. While her lack of criteria might seem like indifference to hierarchy, it is in fact that opposite. The fact that she is more interested in sifting the wheat from the chaff, than in evaluating a particular text’s qualities on its own term, is an attempt to create a canon. F. R. does the same when he says that Eliot’s language ‘ranks’ with Austen and Conrad’s; he does not define the ranking. Thus, Q. D. appears to be thinking about the novel in broad evaluative terms before her husband. In in the piece on Gissing, Leavis goes on to say that ‘the history of the English novel’ needs writing ‘from the point of view of the twentieth century (it is always seen from the point of view of the mid-nineteenth)’ (p. 80). This is precisely what The Great Tradition would do. I believe the evidence I outline in this chapter suggests that it is very unlikely whether The Great Tradition would exist in its current form without Q. D. Leavis’s input. Regardless of how much Q. D. contributes to the rest of The Great Tradition, there is thematic, stylistic, and biographical evidence that the tradition-making chapter contains her input. Most notably, Austen’s presence in the book’s famous first line appears to be because either F. R. was heavily influenced by Q. D.’s work, or because she was the person who wrote this line. While Q. D. only makes a brief connection between the ‘great’ writers in the ‘Critical Theory’, the reference is not casual. She is arguing that these writers embody the archetypal Leavisian rhetoric of seriousness, intensity, and conscious intent. In other words, she is outlining a tradition. Furthermore, in an essay published after her death, which Singh believes was written in the ‘last ten years or so of her life’, she once again recites the list of the great novelists as Austen, Eliot, James, and Conrad.88 Several decades after The Great Tradition, then, Q. D. still holds the opinion that Austen is central to the novelistic canon. If any scholar is interested in what Johnson calls ‘the idea and the practice of the modern novelistic canon’, it is Q. D. Leavis—and her canon includes Jane Austen.

88 Q. D. Leavis, ‘Literary Values and the Novel’, in Collected Essays, Volume 3: The Novels of Religious Controversy, ed. by G. S. Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 199. 190

More Than a Classic

Whether one judges intellectual property by words or ideas, I believe that there are two intellects at work in The Great Tradition. If it is not possible to prove that Q. D. Leavis wrote certain parts though, one might ask how much these clues matter. To reiterate, my aim in this chapter is not to make conclusive claims, but to probe the notion of F. R. Leavis’s authorship over a text and his ownership of an intellectual field. But I believe that the questions I raise in this chapter apply to all scholarship. Why don’t we put editors’ and secretaries’ – and wives’ – names on book covers? If the evidence I present points to a murky, messy compositional process, I believe that this is only how most books take shape and that authorial ambiguity clouds every writer’s work. Despite what existing histories of literary academia say, one person did not single-handedly revolutionise an entire discipline, and to say so atrophies a rich and messy network of institutional and individual actions. As I argue throughout this project, though, too, academia’s criteria for commendable intellectual work is intrinsically bound up in the feminisation of certain qualities. Assistive, repetitive, capacious, encouraging work may on occasion be applauded, but it is rarely rewarded. The other reason the clues about The Great Tradition’s composition matter is because they tell us about the status of undoubtedly the most popular literary form, both then and now. One might ask: if The Great Tradition had included Jane Austen, would it have changed the academic status of the novel? I believe it would. Presenting the ‘infant wailings’ of that ‘mere slip of a girl’ alongside Eliot, James, and Conrad, could have said to the literary world that romance and etiquette can make ‘great’ stories and ‘great’ works of art. Those feminine ‘trivialities’ might have counterbalanced the book’s masculinist rhetoric, as they do in Leavis’s ‘Critical Theory’. It might have also sustained a historical view of the novel, which, as Morley and Spurgeon demonstrate, was at one time extravagantly effeminate. Indeed, before F. R. Leavis even begins studying at university, those two scholars’ pamphlets and lectures are teaching the novel to far less esteemed audiences than The Great Tradition will, but literary audiences, nonetheless. Essentially, then, the upper echelons of academia do not see novel studies until both the ideal novel and the study of the novel have masculine connotations; in other words, until they reflect its values. Until feminist scholars revive the traditions of women’s literature many decades later, Jane Austen is destined to remain a hard-worker, rather than a miracle-worker, and more, but also less, than a classic.

Conclusion: After the Pioneers

But if the socially unrepresentative content of the canon really has to do in the first place with how access to the means of literary production is socially regulated, a different history of canon formation will be necessary, one in which social identities are historical categories determined as much by the system of production as consumption. The present tendency to restrict canonical critique to the reception of images attests to the absence of any theoretical understanding of the relation between a real historical silence—exclusion from the means of literary production—and the sphere of reproduction, in this case, the university. John Guillory, 1993

…it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, 2013

In her memoir, written in the 1940s, Edith Morley writes:

We hear a great deal nowadays of women’s earlier struggle against their opponents for their rights and their freedom. Less is said concerning the more painful and pain-giving necessity of contention with parents and brothers and friends about the countless little things which, in their sum, create a mountain of difficulty and repression.1

This project is concerned with the latter phase Morley mentions, after ostentatious political victories, when communities and cultures begin to integrate. Morley’s, Spurgeon’s, and Leavis’s experiences suggest that while women undoubtedly benefitted from studying at university, they also encountered many difficulties in an academia that had yet to embrace its new recruits. Most notably, in the case of Morley’s negotiations over her professorship, becoming a professional was not necessarily the victory portrayed by women’s rights campaigners or more familiar literary figures, such as Virginia Woolf. Furthermore, being a pioneer did not necessarily secure them a place in literary history. As I discuss in chapters two and four, later scholarship often overlooks their work, addresses it perfunctorily, or contains errors. Spurgeon’s extraordinary book on Shakespeare’s imagery, which she hoped had done valuable legwork for generations of future scholars, seemed passé within a decade. Even Q. D. Leavis, the most famous of the scholars I

1 University of Reading, Special Collections, Edith Morley Collection, MS 938/7/4, ‘Looking Before and After: Reminiscences of a Working Life’, p. 51. 192 discuss, is rarely now the subject of discussions on the novel, a field of study to which she contributed various bold assays. Were Leavis still alive, she would undoubtedly be dismayed to learn that she is more likely to be the subject of literary gossip than literary criticism. What happens after the pioneers, then? Is there a time when even the ‘countless little things’ are resolved? Looking at future generations of women scholars, it appears that those who most successfully established themselves were those who adhered to the new critical paradigm. One of the most renowned women scholars of the post-war period, Helen Gardner (1908-1986), found a comfortable position within the academy, as well as public literary culture, becoming Merton Professor at Oxford in 1966 and a Dame in 1967.2 Graduating from Somerville College in Oxford in 1931, Gardner worked at Royal Holloway and Birmingham University before returning to Oxford in 1941. Her place in the literary establishment is signalled by the fact that she was chosen in 1960 to testify to the literary merit of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the obscenity trial and selected in 1972 to edit a new version of the popular Oxford Book of English Verse. Gardner’s research interests are more conventional than Morley, Spurgeon, or Leavis; she writes mostly on Shakespeare, Milton, and T. S. Eliot. Her sense of the purposes of literary criticism are more conventional, too. She argues, for example, that literary study ‘has its own proper strenuousness’, because it brings pupils ‘more immediately and continuously into contact with original sources, the actual material’, ‘involves him so necessarily in ancillary disciplines’, and ‘touches his own life at so many points and more illuminates the world of his own daily experience’.3 There are clear echoes of Leavisian dogma in her appeals to authenticity, intellectual breadth, and moral instructiveness. Gardner’s success suggests that, while many members of minority groups can enter a community, as Erving Goffman explains, only those who do not ‘test the limits of the acceptance’ can fully ingratiate themselves. While this project looks specifically at gender, I believe its arguments are also more broadly relevant to recent debates about literary value and inclusion revolving around the foci ‘decolonisation’ and ‘freedom of speech’. Not wanting to conflate experiences of oppression, I instead wish to highlight that universities appear to respond to political challenges uniformly whatever the century. Indeed, black, feminist, and queer scholars in the latter half of the twentieth century precipitated vital changes to curricula, yet the university’s attempts at initiatives in inclusion and diversity, ineffective at addressing institutional cultures, now appear tokenistic and somewhat cynical. In their recent book, Decolonising the University,

2 Walter Bird, ‘Dame Helen Louise Gardner’, Oxford Dictionary National Biography, 2001-2004, ed. by Lawrence Goldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 3 Helen Gardner, ‘The Academic Study of English Literature’, Critical Quarterly, 1 (1959) 106–115 (pp. 111-112). 193

Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nişancıoğlu explain that the decolonisation movement seeks to ‘transform the terms upon which the university (and education more broadly) exists, the purpose of the knowledge it imparts and produces, and its pedagogical operations’.4 Disillusioned with reform and modifications, they emphasise that decolonisation aims ‘not simply to deconstruct’ Western epistemological traditions, but ‘to transform them’ (p. 2). Similarly, in their 2013 manifesto for the Undercommons, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney argue that calls for the university’s ‘restoration’ capitulate to the intrinsically hierarchical nature of institutions, and, therefore, ‘the only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one’.5 With U.K. institutions facing another wave of professionalisation in the wake of lost government subsidies and the promotion of STEM subjects, literary studies appears to have returned to an era in which it has to stake a claim for its own existence. Bhambra, Gebrial, and Nişancıoğlu also argue that, while decolonial thinkers Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang claim that ‘‘decolonization is not a metaphor’’, but a ‘‘struggle over dispossession’’ (p. 4), they believe the movement should not ‘turn away from discursive projects associated with these practices (such as liberalism and Orientalism)’ (p. 5). This re-orientation towards cultures of oppression is evident in early women scholars’ reflections, too. As Morley explains, after basic access is won, those ‘countless little things’ remain urgent precisely because they are more subtle, more likely to take place in interpersonal exchanges, and thus more difficult to contest. While it was wholly necessary for the decolonisation movement to affirm antagonism and material redress in order to interrogate neo-liberal aspirations towards tolerance (which Joseph North aptly describes as a ‘dead peace’), it is also necessary to proclaim that narratives and cultures have ideological force, too.6 Assessing the post-pioneer phase of a movement can therefore benefit from feminist critiques, which are well practised at heeding those minute, amorphous aggressions that fall beyond what positivist research can measure or the state can legislate against. In a major intervention into debates on institutional reforms in the ’90s, John Guillory explains that framing the problem as inclusion or exclusion fails because ‘exclusion should not be defined as exclusion from representation but from access to the means of cultural production’.7 In

4 Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, eds, Decolonising the University (London: Pluto Press, 2018), p. 1. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 5 Fred Moten, and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), p. 26. 6 Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2017), p. 211. 7 John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 18. Further references to this edition are stated after quotations in brackets in the main body of the text. 194

Guillory’s analysis, university cultures will not change until the distribution of material resources changes. Yet, while I agree with his assessment that ‘[t]he system of educational institutions reproduces social relationships by distributing […] knowledges’ (p. 56), I want to query his implication that material inequalities are fundamental, catalytic. Elsewhere, Guillory claims that, because progressives focus on representation, ‘[t]he critique of the canon can at present offer no analysis of the relation between the forms of cultural and material capital’ (p. 38). My research, which attempts this analysis for one group of people academia has marginalised, suggests that cultures can bring about material change, too. By illustrating the ways in which early literary academia’s gendered discourse persistently reaps material problems for women such as Morley, Spurgeon, and Leavis, my research suggests that ways of creating new discourses, new communities of meaning, also require redistribution. Women working in nascent literary departments continually battled an invisible enemy: masculinist, professionalised critical rhetoric. But engaging in battle also fostered empathy and solidarity. The insular cultures college women such as Caroline Spurgeon and Dorothy Sayers created meant that they could better grapple with material difficulties and shelter from masculinist discourse. Bringing a feminist angle to Guillory’s argument, then, I want to address his claim that there is little understanding about the relationship between ‘exclusion from the means of literary production’ and ‘the sphere of reception’ (p. 18). When we look at what marginalised women’s experiences in the early twentieth century, we see that the relationship between reception and production is mutual. From Morley’s demotion to a ‘Language’ professor to Leavis’s confinement as a ‘typist-collaborator’, the culture of masculinist, professionalism through which literary academia receives women’s research significantly affects their ability to continue to access the means of production. Their experiences demonstrate that, even when one gains access to such means, one is still not necessarily able to use them to change the cultures upon which one’s continuing access remains contingent. As Morley’s women working in seven professions illustrate, nominal equality of opportunity isn’t enough; only positive discrimination and explicit hospitality begins to redress the balance. To phrase my point another way: if universities want to hire more black professors, they not only need to create jobs for them, they need to foster environments in which black students want to go on to become professors—which means asking those students what they want the university to look like. Re-orientating the cultural and material components of exclusion further qualifies Guillory’s analysis of literary reproduction, as well as that by the originator of the term ‘cultural capital’, Pierre Bourdieu. Guillory remarks that, although syllabuses now feature more women authors, institutional attempts to reform itself tend to create a ‘sexual hierarchy’ in which 195 politicised work remains one of the ‘devalorized textual practices’ (p. 24). Thus, those most likely to use these practices, people with experiences of oppression, remain lower down the hierarchy. I believe that Leavis’s work in particular demonstrates the ramifications of this intellectual bind. As I discuss in chapter three, what Leavis objects to so vehemently in Dorothy Sayers’s novels is the blatant display of literary learning. She therefore highlights the ease with which cultural capital can be acquired, regardless of one’s gender. What Guillory overlooks, and Leavis’s outburst illuminates, is the sexual hierarchy of literary reproduction, too. The moment when women access the means of critical production, they relinquish their ability to perform naturalised cultural reproduction in the home. They cannot write an article on Little Women and then read it to their children at night. Except, of course, they can, but they must vacillate between expert and inexpert roles to do so. When women access the means of literary production via academia in the early twentieth century, then, they effectively split their roles into those of formal and informal cultural instructor. Thus, even when they gain access to the material means of literary production, which Guillory proposes as a solution, their relationship to cultural capital remains gendered. Finally, tethering cultures to material conditions allows us to venture beyond the universities to whom historians such as Joseph North attribute disciplinary ‘lines of force’. Women’s literary microcosms show us how disciplines draw ‘lines of force’ – how they delineate their values – and therefore their limitations. The fact that women transfigure their isolation into generically localised tropes and codes suggests that ideologically charged environments produce texts whose aesthetic features need greater socio-historic contextualisation. Women’s collegiate literary cultures, in particular, pose a challenge to the most famous movement of their day, practical criticism: if some cultures cannot be read by the uninitiated, is the close reading of anonymised texts as universally useful as the name suggests, or, indeed, as histories of the discipline have since touted? Richards’s decision to call his method ‘practical’ is perhaps the most intriguing aspect of his experiment; while it clearly streamlined lesson preparation, it is acutely ironic that his method encouraged abstract, historically dislocated reading. As I query in chapter two: for whom is reading ‘practical’ if it prohibits emotion or reference to personal experience? Not for Morley, Spurgeon, or Leavis, who consistently read biographically, politically, and whose statistics retain a strong impression of the people behind the words on the page. I call these three women’s work pragmatic, then, because they are responsive to their environments and deeply concerned with method. Not united by any intrinsically feminine way of reading or writing, but by the common experience of being exceptions and being women, I argue that they are keenly aware of socio-political conditions because they are continually reminded of 196 their own. In other words, they read as women because academia reads them as women. Over the course of this project, I have described the ways in which they engage with their personal circumstances politically, use statistical criticism diagnostically, encode experiences of college life, and attend to women novelists with notably feminine subject-matter. These tendencies go against the masculinist grain of their discipline and are innovative, paradoxically, precisely because they are not trying to be. Because they see literature in its time and place, they continue to place Austen in the ‘great tradition’, call novels miracles, and appreciate young girls’ sensations. Morley, Spurgeon, and even Leavis fail to raze femininity from literary criticism, to overwrite its effeminate ancestry of belles-lettres and gossip for the new professional era. Ultimately, their experiences and their writings ask us to interrogate the promise of critical neutrality defined as an escape from the self. When F. L. Lucas asks, responding to T. S. Eliot, ‘why not say ‘I demand’, instead of ‘Art demands’’, he argues that ‘impersonality’ is about critics wanting to seem ‘severe intellectuals with none of your sentimental nonsense about them’.8 I believe that Morley’s, Spurgeon’s, and Leavis’s work shows us the repercussions of outlawing sentimentality outright, along with possibilities for studying literature in ways that are both incisive and emotional, prescient and pragmatic.

8 F. L. Lucas, Studies in French and English (London: Cassell & Co., 1934), p. 307. 197

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Zink, Suzana, Virginia Woolf’s Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

All dictionary definitions come from the Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)

Archives Consulted

Downing College Archive, Personal Papers of F. R. Leavis East Sussex, Brighton and Hove Record Office, Documents relating to Old Postman’s Cottage, Alciston Folger Shakespeare Library, Personal Papers of Caroline Spurgeon Girton College Archive, Personal Papers of Q. D. Leavis; Virginia Woolf: Collected File; English Director of Studies London School of Economics Library, Fabian Society Collection Magdalene College, Old Library, The Richards Collection Royal Holloway, University of London Archive, Personal Papers of Caroline Spurgeon University of Reading, Special Collections, Personal Papers of Edith Morley; Correspondence of W. M. Childs University Library, Cambridge, English Faculty Records; Theses University of Sussex Library, Virginia Woolf Engagement Diaries