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SAILING ALL ALONE a Study of Spinsters in the Novels of Barbara

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SAILING ALL ALONE a Study of Spinsters in the Novels of Barbara SAILING ALL ALONE A Study of Spinsters in the Novels of Barbara Pym and Emily Hilda Young. Valerie Pitty A Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts ( English ) at Honours level, by combined Coursework and Research. University of New South Wales June 1995 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr Louise Miller, and Professor Mary Chan, of the School of English, University of New South Wales, for the help and encouragement they have given me in writing this thesis. \ Valerie Pitty June 1995 2 Contents Page Table of Abbreviations 3 Introduction 4 Chapter 1 'Excellent Women': Hannah Mole and Mildred Lathbury 22 Chapter 2 Friendships between Women: Barbara Pym's Comical Couples 33 Chapter 3 Sisters, Companons, and Conspirators in the Novels of E.H. Young 42 Chapter 4 Spinsters in Pursuit 55 Chapter 5 .. Lone Voyagers 64 Chapter 6 Drifting into Love 74 Chapter 7 First Love and Fair Prospects: Barbara Pym's Young Girls 85 Chapter 8 Looking for a Lightship: Girls in the Novels of E.H. Young 95 Chapter 9 The Prizes: Bachelors and Widowers 104 Conclusion 118 Novels of Barbara Pym and E. H. Young 122 Bibliography 124 3 Table of Abbreviations Novels ofE.H. Young: TMM ...................... The Misses Mallett MM......................... Miss Mole JW Jenny Wren TCW The Curate's Wife TVD ........................The Vicar's Daughter C ............................. Celia CS ........................... Chatterton Square Novels of Barbara Pym: STG ........................ Some Tame Gazelle CH .......................... Crampton Hodnet LTA ......................... Less Than Angels J &P ........................ .Jane and Prudence AGOB ..................... A Glass of Blessings NFRL ...................... No Fond Return of Love AUA ........................ An Unsuitable Attachment TSDD .......................The Sweet Dove Died QIA .......................... Quartet in Autumn AFGL. ...................... A Few Green Leaves 4 INTRODUCTION She liked to see it sailing all alone, never getting any farther and never losing its gallantness. (Miss Mole) Barbara Pym ( 1913-1918) and Emily Hilda Young ( 1880- 1949) are novelists whose work documented an almost exclusively female consciousness. Their novels were admired, reviewed and criticised by men but were clearly directed towards a female audience. The settings are largely domestic and the subject matter is the emotional experience of their female protagonists. Young wrote about women in a family setting, and the conflicts of love and loyalty this involved. Her characters are mainly married women or young women seeking marriage, but her most highly acclaimed creation is a spinster. Pym wrote for the most part about spinsters, and their struggle to maintain their autonomy and self-respect in a society that devalued them because of their single status. The work of these two novelists demonstrates the constancy of the spinster's position as a marginalised woman, despite changes in her economic position and in social attitudes towards her, throughout the present century up to the 1970's. Feminist critics have noted that the position of the spinster became anomalous rather late in the 19th century .(l) Although "women who did not marry were a class of unfortunates" (Calder, 58), the half a million unmarried women who existed in Victorian times, fitted into the domestic lives of their married relatives as housekeepers or carers for children, partly owing to the high mortality rate of women in childbirth. Little chance of employment outside the home existed for middle-class women; in fact, " in the mid-nineteenth century, the genteel poor woman had a choice of three underpaid occupations - governess, companion or sempstress"(Vicinus, 3). As a consequence of the financial instability of the 1840's, many middle-class women were forced to leave home and take 5 positions as teachers and governesses, and as the century advanced, new and different types of work became available. Nursing, typing, work in the Post Office,and eventually the professions opened up for women (Stubbs, 124). As clerical occupations and teaching became established as respectable employment, the "popularity of fiction concerning the self­ sufficient, autonomous woman" grew, and the "business-woman's novel" appeared frequently in the early twentieth century. It appeared that women might achieve real freedom of choice in both occupation and hetero-sexual relationships, with "those who chose celibacy less "unsexed" than might be expected".(Pratt, 112-116). The First World War, after temporarily opening unprecedented employment opportunities for women, ultimately set the cause of single women back by devaluing their status. Phyllis Bentley's autobiography mentions a headline "which announced stridently: A :MILLION SURPLUS WOMEN". The writer comments,"Surplus! rather a bitter word" as she records how women were exhorted to " clear out. .. and leave jobs open for returning men", and how she resented the implication that women were useful "only as mates" (106). Moreover, with the granting of the vote to women over 30 in 1918, "the final blow against single women was the demise of a large feminist movement that had given many a support group and had validated their single lives" (Vicious, 209). Young was writing her novels against this background, and Pym, a generation later, faced an equally determined, if more subtle, post-War campaign to convince women that their natural sphere was domesticity. In the 1950's, popularised Freudian psychology was used as an added persuasion to induce women to believe that matrimony, motherhood and consumerism were women's only natural destinations .. The literary antecedents of the spinster characters in Young and Pym are clear. Miss Bates, the garrulous, ingratiating spinster in 6 Emma, living in genteel poverty, has some counterparts. The economic dependency and emotional isolation of the Victorian governess, documented fictionally by the Brontes in Agnes Grey and Villette, and by Harriet Martineau in Deerbrook, is recognizable in the lonely, if less harrowing, situations of some of Pym's and Young's characters. Trollope's Lily Dale, (The Small House at Allingham), often cited as a woman who chooses spinsterhood, following a disappointment in love, and achieves a contented autonomy, has no distinct parallel. However, the importance of financial security, an established social status, and settled accommodation, in successfully making such an adjustment, is as obvious in the works of Young and Pym as it is in those of Trollope. The gentle life of the elderly spinster in a small community, which loves and respects her, is represented by Mrs Gaskell's Cranford, and some of the early novels of Young and Pym are reminiscent of this work. Nevertheless, even in the 1880's, "[s]pinsters could not be heroines. They were at best...good but limited, or worthy but unpleasant" (Calder, 165). The woman who chose not to marry was often denigrated by Victorian novelists. George Moore wrote with sympathy of the lot of the single mother in Esther Waters; in A Drama in Muslin, he pitied the fate of the "muslin martyrs", girls destined for lifelong spinsterhood, and doubly doomed if they were plain and intlellectual. Yet he characterised the woman who elected spinsterhood as a vain, frigid coquette in the person of Mildred Lawson in Celibates. Young and Pym both describe such women, although in less condemnatory terms. In The Odd Women, George Gissing gives a sympathetic portrait of middle-aged spinsters, struggling with uncertain employment and poverty, but the New Woman, in the person of Rhoda Nunn, is "obsessive and dominating ... a prig and a puritan" (Calder, 201). The "emancipated woman" of the late nineteenth century was caricatured by anti-feminist novelists as "harsh, sexless, aggressive ... ugly, 7 unattractive ... badly dressed, neurotic or lesbian" (Stubbs, 142). Although some of these characteristics distinguish many of Pym's middle-aged or elderly spinsters, her portraits are more affectionate than otherwise, and always humorous. Young presents two unpleasantly stereotypical elderly spinsters, but these are balanced by her portrait of Agnes Spanner in Chatterton Square, who, despite exhibiting many of the same features, is a wholly admirable character. One constant in the depiction of spinsters is the fact that "a woman who worked was very rarely the centre of interest in the novel, and even where the heroine did work the emphasis was still on her emotional life" (Stubbs, 124). This remains as true for the novels of Young and Pym as it was for nineteenth century fiction, and the search for emotional fulfilment is the dominant theme in the lives of their characters. A World War intervened to change the course of life and work for both writers. Emily Hilda Young married a solicitor, J.A.H. Daniell, in 1902. Prior to the first World War, she published A Com of Wheat (1910) and Yonder (1912). Her third novel Moor Fires appeared in 1916. Contemporary reviews of the last two two detected promise, but reproached the writer for "signs of crudity and immaturity" (Nation 6/1/13). Moor Fires introduced the theme of a young woman, betrothed to one man, who marries and achieves sexual fulfilment, and thence love, with another, "an incomprehensible juxtaposition" as the Times reviewer declared (TLS 7/12/16). The theme however bore some relation to her own life, for, following the death of her husband at Ypres in 1917, Young left Bristol, the site of all her future novels, and went to London to live with Ralph Henderson and his wife. The menage a trois was maintained until Mrs Henderson's death during World War 2. As Ralph Henderson was the Head Master of the Alleyne School, Dulwich, the relationship, agreeable to all three, was, of necessity, conducted with great discretion (Bayley, Intro. to William xv). 8 Young published seven more novels, which were favourably reviewed in England and the United States: The Bridge Dividing (1922), later retitled The Misses Mallett ( The Malletts in the U.S.A.); William (192); The Vicar's Daughter ( 1928).
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