UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

DATE: 15 May, 2003

I, Anna Catherine Priebe , hereby submit this as part of the requirements for the degree of:

Doctorate of Philosophy in:

English Literature It is entitled:

“May I Disturb You?”: British Women Writers, Imperial Identities, and the Late Imperial Period, 1880-1940.

Approved by: Wayne E. Hall, PH.D Tamar Heller, PH.D Maura O’Connor, PH.D “MAY I DISTURB YOU?”: BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS, IMPERIAL IDENTITIES, AND THE LATE IMPERIAL PERIOD, 1880-1940.

A dissertation submitted to the

Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTORATE OF PHILOSPHY (Ph.D.)

in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the College of Arts and Sciences

2003

by

Anna Catherine Priebe

B.A., University of Cincinnati, 1993 M.A., University of Cincinnati, 1995

Committee Chair: Wayne E. Hall, Ph.D. Abstract

“May I Disturb You?”: British Women Writers, Imperial Identities,

and the Late Imperial Period, 1880-1940.

During the late Imperial Period, 1880-1940, the ways in which the identity category

“British” was created allowed for fluidity in both personal and collective identity construction.

Because the period saw both great expansion of the Empire and the federation of many discrete colonies into national entities, the issue of national versus British affiliation became an important one. Given these particular historical circumstances, budding national identities could be elided into Britishness and Britishness into the budding national identities. And this potential for fluidity influenced the ways people could and did use their British, English, or other colonial identities when negotiation the enormous social, political, economic, and cultural changes of the era. Using Julia Kristeva’s notion of the “subject-in-process” and her theory of female individuation, the study examines the writing of four British women writers of the period and its relationship to modern Britishness: “Lucas Malet” from England, “Somerville and Ross” from

Ireland, and Rosa Praed from Australia. Though they were all white, middle-class, British women writers, and though they all addressed the complexities and possibilities created by the inter-connected, trans-nationalist slippages of the imperial system, their responses are inflected by the particular relationship of their home place to the culture of the “center.” Lucas Malet understood that, in order to unseat what she considered the “dullness” of the English middle class, she needed to question the legitimacy of the narratives being used to knit women into the

English social fabric. For Somerville and Ross, the difficulties women faced in their quests for individuality were compounded by competing narratives of Irish national identity, narratives which often seemed to overpower the thoughtful, intelligent voice of the Anglo-Irish woman.

The trauma Rosa Praed experienced in her youth on the Australian frontier is reflected throughout her work in her preoccupation with experiences that are difficult to articulate, can be enormously inspiring, and yet can also threaten her heroines’ physical, emotional, and spiritual integrity.

Acknowledgements

This project would never have been completed without the support and encouragement of my family, and I would like to thank them all. My parents Dorothy and Peter Lawrow gave me a love of learning and deep appreciation of the arts; my mother- and father-in-law Lila and

Bruce Priebe offered constant and kind support. My daughter Elianor patiently found other things to do while “Mummy was working on her big paper;” and without the love and good commonsense of my wonderful husband Craig, I would still be lost in a sea of unnecessary details.

I would also like to extended my deepest and most sincere thanks to my dissertation committee: Dr. Tamar Heller, Dr. Maura O’Connor, and Dr. Wayne Hall. Dr. Hall has been a constant positive presence throughout my college career at the University of Cincinnati, and I believe it is no exaggeration to say that without his patient support and capable assistance, I would never have finished this project. 1

Table of Contents

Introduction. Imperial Beginnings and Endings ...... 2

Chapter1. Narrating the Late Imperial Period, 1880-1940…………………………………… 14

Chapter 2. Rewriting English Courage: “Lucas Malet”………………………………………. 42

Chapter 3. Rollicking in Ernest : “Somerville and Ross”……………………………………... 85

Chapter 4. The Spirit and the Bush : Rosa Praed……………………………………………… 135

Conclusion. The Narrative of Disturbance or the Disturbance of the Narrative? ……………….188

Works cited………………………………………………………………………….192 2

Introduction.

Imperial beginnings and endings.

It was a December morning in1978 when, after emerging out of the cosmopolitan bustle of London’s Heathrow Airport, I stared incredulously at the scene before me. From the time I had left my family and friends in the brilliant light and color of an Australian summer morning, I had waited impatiently for this meeting with one of the fabled places of my childhood, a meeting

I imagined would be the most important moment of my life. For years I had heard people speak reverently about “Home” as though the very experience of stepping onto English soil was a wonder, the ingredient needed to become an individual of worth. And from the dismissive way they spoke of those who had not “made it” in England, it was clear that a person’s inability to take advantage of this quasi-magical influence meant that he or she was deficient, hopelessly untalented, or a simply loser of some kind. If I was certain about anything, it was that I did not want to be considered that; so, it was with a great deal of anticipation that I stepped through those automatic doors.

But to eyes used to the beauty of Sydney harbor and its environs, the streets of London were a shock. The cabbie drove through dingy, tired suburbs filled with scurrying, sickly- looking people. The sky hung gray and heavy over people rummaging through underwear outside a dilapidated Marks and Spencer store, and passers-by barely noticed a bus conductor jump off his double-decker and chase after a black man who had obviously done something he shouldn’t have. This London was not far removed from the seedy, desperate London of a

Dickens novel, a world that I in my naiveté had assumed those wonderful Londoners would surely have “fixed” by now. As the cabby drove through streets whose names I knew as well as those of the city of my birth, I registered with growing dismay the contrast between the 3 marvelous things I had imagined for myself in the great city of London and the squalor of what I actually saw.

Though by the end of my cab ride I had come to terms with the fact that London was not completely what I had imagined, the reality of my new identity—a young woman fresh from a former colony in the fading metropolis—was not made clear to me until later that day. We were a strange group, ballet dancers from all over the Commonwealth drawn together by what we imagined to be our common culture and our goal of dancing professionally in England. We weren’t particularly glad to be thrown together, but our sense that we were culturally related allowed us to create fleeting, uncertain alliances, temporary antidotes to our fears and worries.

At the fruit barrow where we stopped to buy some apples, we consciously and shamelessly applied what we knew to be our bright, colonial ways, and charmed the English barrow boy into giving us more fruit than we had paid for. But, as we were walking away, laughing uproariously about the measly, disfigured English apples, a little Englishwoman walking behind us began a tirade which we soon realized was directed at us. “How dare you make fun of our English produce! It’s typical of you colonials!” she fumed. “Why do you want to come here anyway?

WE certainly don’t want you!” Before we could come up with a suitable retort, she stomped away into the gathering twilight, leaving us giggling, but not a little unsettled.

Though I have forgotten much about that first journey “Home,” the question that little lady spat at the heels of us perky girls has haunted me across the years and, consciously and unconsciously, I have sought an answer to it ever since. Why did being “colonial” mean that we could become the subject of a tirade like that? What was wrong with our being in England when, after all, as members of the British Commonwealth we were supposed to have some kind 4 of deep and unbreakable connection to this Mother country? And, how were we supposed to succeed if the last thing Home seemed to want was us?

It is, of course, impossible to answer these questions with tidy, definitive statements.

Recognition of the complexity of the human psyche and the multifarious nature of individuals’ motivations would prevent such a thing. But even at the time I was aware that there was something elementally wrong about that lady’s dismissal of our importance to British life.

Feminist historians have long sought to restore the contributions of women to the story of British colonialism, and more recently they have focused our attention on the fact that since the earliest days of the British colonial enterprise women from the colonies have made significant contributions to English culture.1 The cultural record shows that generation after generation managed to become legitimate players in the English cultural landscape. How they managed this and how English women viewed them intrigues me, especially with regard to that generation of

Anglo women writers active during the late Imperial period, circa 1880-1940.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm has noted that for many of us there is an historical period that ghosts our deeply-rooted, imagined self. The period is “a twilight zone between history and memory, between the past as a generalized record which is open to relatively dispassionate inspection and the past as a remembered part of, or background to, one’s own life” (3). Though we may only have a tenuous connection to the actual, lived experience of the period, it inspires us and is important to us because our vision of it and what it means has been wrought with powerful threads from different levels of our experience. Our twilight period is “a mixture of learning and second-hand memory shaped by public and private tradition” (Hobsbawm 5). It is

1 See for example, Burton, Trumpener, and Woolacott. 5 what we take—both consciously and unconsciously—from our familial and national lore, our study, and the many levels of our lived experience.

The late imperial period has loomed large in my imagination for as long as I can remember. Like many Australian children of my generation, I was brought up in a community whose connection to the period was still vital, primary, and essential to an understanding of itself. Among other things, the still-British educational system encouraged us to read the romance and adventure literature of the late-Empire years, the “ripping yarns” of brave adventurers in non-European places; World War I was made ever-present each Anzac Day when we were required to dress up as nurses and soldiers to lay a wreath “Lest We Forget”; and the burdens of Imperial warfare entered into my imagination as I listened in awe to the many whispered conversations at family gatherings about the tragic things that happened to Great-

Uncle So-and-So once he came home from the War. It was an ever-present element of life, and the culture I grew up in looked to it with a mixture of reverence, nostalgia, and, as nationalist rhetoric made its periodic resurgences, sometimes scorn and loathing. What I have come to recognize is that, as Eric Hobsbawm has suggested, the period actually “cries out for demystification, just because we . . . are no longer in it, but do not know how much of it is still in us” (5). Though I am not always conscious of the ways it fuels my imagination, when I knowingly turn to it, it is with a sense of comfort and the same deep satisfaction we feel when greeting an old friend.

Every generation learns to read its inherited past in its own way, and one relatively consistent tendency in contemporary postcolonial criticism has been to view Britain’s imposition of British identity on the peoples it gathered into its Empire as an act of oppression.2 Though

2 This unspoken assumption underlies much of the postcolonial criticism which depends on the self/other construction—particularly when the “self” and “other” are used uncritically, as though they refer to racially “pure” 6 this was most certainly true in many cases, it was also true that for many colonial men and women, to be identified as British meant, to some extent, the possibility of liberation from constraints placed on them by their cultures of origin—especially when they were able to leave that place of origin. To be claimed as “British” brought with it the demand that one be loyal to the whims of the center, but Britishness also created the possibility for enormous fluidity in terms of how an individual construed him or herself at home, at Home, and in all kinds of places in between.3

An example of such fluidity is Merle Oberon, a film star who achieved an international reputation during the 1930s and 40s and was once touted by the London Morning Post as

“probably England’s best known screen actress” (qtd. in Woolacott 147). Oberon herself claimed to be Tasmanian Australian by birth, but research has since revealed that she was actually born in Bombay “to a dark-skinned Singhalese woman of mixed race (part Maori, according to the biographers) and an English working-class father” (Woolacott 147). The fiction of Oberon’s Australian birth was apparently invented by her English publicist—probably to give her a more respectable background in terms of race and class—but Oberon herself held to it for the rest of her life (147). As a woman of mixed race living in British India, Oberon would have had enormous hurdles to scale in order to succeed in any endeavor, but she was able to use her identity as a British subject eventually to conceal all connections with her Indian identity and pass successfully as a quite different British someone.

cultural entities. Notions such as “hybridity,” “the Third Space of enunciation,” and transculturation have sought to question such assumptions and insist that all cultures are to some degree woven together out of many different racial and cultural threads. But there is still “a considerable degree of contestation over what is, and is not, ‘properly’ postcolonial” (Moore-Gilbert 188) amongst postcolonial critics, which seems to indicate that the old hierarchies have not yet been properly deposed. 3 The ways women used these identities is the subject of Ros Pesman’s Duty Free: Australian Women Abroad. Pesman tracks the interesting series of colonial roles women travelers tended to adopt on the long sea journey from Australia to London. 7

Though Oberon’s example is extreme, it does illustrate the point. Because Britishness bound one to a ruling power rather than a particular genealogical heritage based in a particular geographical place, it meant that there was a lot of room to maneuver when it came to the construction of identity. This was, I would like to argue, especially true during the period 1880-

1940 which, besides the expansion of the Empire saw the federation of many discrete colonies into national entities, such as the Commonwealth of Australia, and the creation of independent nations like the Republic of Ireland (Chamberlain 61). Though many of these colonies and federations of colonies gradually achieved a certain degree of self-rule during this period, they were still irrevocably responsible to the British Empire, and were slow to develop legislation that created citizenship rights for those who lived within their jurisdiction.4 Human beings do not, of course, need legislation to feel as though they belong to a particular cultural, political, or social community, but the fact that these budding national identities could easily be elided into

Britishness and Britishness into the budding national identities meant that the possibility existed for much easy give-and-take in both personal and collective identity construction.

One of the difficulties we face when trying to determine who considered themselves a member of any particular imperial collective during this period is that such an identification was sometimes as emotional as it was logical. Even if an individual felt completely affiliated with his or her identity as a certain kind of British subject, he or she might, on occasion, also claim another, very different association. Angela Woolacott gives the example of Australian women living and working in London at the turn of the century who “waxed lyrical to the English of their colonies’ or nation’s virtues,” but who had every intention of staying in London. Though

4 The 1948 British Nationality Bill was developed, in part, to reassert the British government’s power over the British Dominions and India. This bill stipulated that while such states could “confer citizenship on [their] own subjects, all such citizens together with the inhabitants of the as-yet-uncolonized imperial territories . . . would remain British subjects” (Baucom 10). 8 they might yearn for the “beauty of the Australian bush and the virtues of a more democratic society,” they might just as easily write glowingly of the advantages of London life over that of life in Sydney (Woolacott 147). What made the difference was often an emotional response to a particular experience, such as the first view of the metropolis or the scent of a plant peculiar to a homeland, but a shift could also be the result of a conscious wish to emphasize one’s affiliation with a particular community. In other words, such shifts in identity could occur in any place and for any number of reasons, but such slipperiness was, in good part, made possible by the important role affect played in modern British identity construction.

This potential for fluidity influenced the ways people could and did use their British,

English, or other colonial identities when negotiating the enormous social, political, economic, and cultural changes that occurred throughout the Empire between 1870 and 1940. Because the center could dictate at any given moment that an individual or collective behave according to the terms imposed by Britishness, that they behave as British subjects rather than (or as well as)

Anglo-Irish, Australians, or Ugandans for example, it meant that when individuals used or privileged their other imperial identity (or identities) and the places that inspired them, they must have been very aware that in doing so they were dividing themselves from the supposed homogeneity of Britishness. By claiming a particular colonial affiliation, they were consciously signaling their difference from or similarity to other kinds of imperial peoples. If we look at when, how, and in response to what these differences were manifested or made obvious, it is, perhaps, possible to understand something of the complex dynamics that underlay personal and collective identity construction at specific moments during the period.

In order to tease out possibilities, I will turn to the fiction of four British women writers whose creative lives spanned the period in question: “Lucas Malet” (Mary St. Leger Kingsley 9

Harrison), “Somerville and Ross” (Edith Somerville and Violet Martin), and Rosa Praed

Campbell. On the most basic level, these women were contemporaries. They were born in the

1850s, and wrote and/or published in England from the 1880s until shortly before their deaths.

They published their first novels as Britain’s imperial expansion was given new momentum, and they lived and wrote through the radical cultural changes brought on by World War I. All of them would have been considered white women from middle-class backgrounds, members of the

British Empire who could unashamedly take advantage of the privileges allowed them by contemporary conceptions of race, class, and gender. This does not mean that they all had equal access to such privileges, but all of them gained enough advantage from the way their race, class, and gender figured during the period that they could make names for themselves as professional writers in England as well as in the colonies.

The coincidences of their life spans and their race, class, and gender would, in themselves, normally be enough to justify a comparative study of these women’s work. Such a study might easily produce some worthwhile observations on the way those same identity categories figure differently in their fiction over the period. But the impetus for this project is not just a wish to search out ways in which conceptions of British self and colonial other were manifested in imaginative prose. It is that nagging, little question tossed at the backs of a group of giggling, colonial girls by an ornery little Englishwoman some forty years after the last of these colonial women writers died. I want to find a way to answer that lady of my experience, an answer that will help us both understand the history upon which her question was premised and, perhaps, change the way that she and I understand our past, present, and future. As Catherine

Hall has so wisely noted, “if we want to know how we are produced as modern subjects, what narratives from the past enable us to construct identities, how historical memories and the 10 shadows and ghosts of memories are internalized in our lives [then we need to ask] new questions of old and new sources” (66).

In other words, if I really want to find an answer to that little English lady’s question, it will not suffice that I use the same tools she did. I cannot simply mine the works of these women for their particular contribution to the combative, estranging narrative of English self vs. colonial other upon which she based her assumptions about myself and my friends. Such narratives reinforce rather than question the idea that the relationship between the center and the peripheries was always one of domination, the colonizer exerting power over the colonized or the colonized exerting power over the colonizer in some form. And it is difficult, if not impossible, for such narratives to account for the kind of inter-connected, trans-nationalist slippages that the imperial system clearly produced and that I believe is a crucial element in the writing of these white, middle-class, British colonial women.

Instead, I want to question how much similarity can we expect from the coincidences of these women’s lifespans, their race, their class, their gender, and their Britishness. How alike and different were they or would they have considered themselves? They came from British spaces which lay thousands of miles apart: Lucas Malet from England, Edith Somerville and

Violet Martin from Ireland, and Rosa Praed from Australia. And yet, the matrices of power that established the British identity of all these women also established their relationship to their particular places of birth. What did they imagine Britishness enabled, and what did they imagine it squelched? How does the period look if we bring together the voices of women such as these whose relationships to the center and the peripheries is not so superficially cut-and-dried that the story we can tell about them is one of utter domination by others or their utter domination of others? What does a conversation between those whose identities fluctuated between that of 11 colonizers and colonized reveal about the way the British Empire ran as a modern enterprise?

What does it reveal about the assumptions that underlie the lives of all of us brought up in once-

British spaces?

Because I wish to understand how the fluidity that underlay affiliations to particular

British spaces influenced the ways these women writers responded imaginatively to the challenges of modern, imperial life, I will look at three of each woman’s fictional works. In an attempt to remain consistent with Catherine Hall’s call to ask new questions of old and new sources, I have not chosen these works because of the value assigned to them by previous critics; instead, they are chosen because of where they fall in the chronology of the author’s creative life.

They are the first novel published by the writer, the first work published after World War I, and the last work published with the sanction of the writer before her death. Publication dates are, I realize, notoriously fickle and often depend on factors beyond the control of authors, but from what I can assess, publication of these works occurred within a year or two of their being completed by the author or according to the author’s communicated plan. Because of the coincidences of these women’s lifespans, it is, I believe, not wrong to assume that in their fiction they would be responding to some of the same phenomena. But how those responses are inflected by the way they imagined the particularities of British and colonial identities will, I believe, tell us something which may help us understand the complex, trans-national nature of

British imperial life during this period, a way of life that still ghosts our contemporary lives in significant ways.

My assumption is that modern human subjects are, as Julia Kristeva proposes, subjects- in-process and that shifts in identification are both responses to changes in the way a subject perceives his or her relationship to his or her world and the way that world perceives the subject. 12

The tension, the energy necessary for this creative struggle, is produced by the subject’s simultaneous desire for and rebellion against a stable subjectivity, a subjectivity which is constantly prone to judgment by the world in which a subject exists. This does not mean that the development of subjectivity is always a conscious choice because, as Kristeva has so compellingly argued, the development of subjectivity is always a revolutionary process.5 As subjects we are “at the center of the most radical heterogeneity maintained as a struggle between semiotic and symbolic forces” (Smith 24), a struggle that can have unexpected and often surprising results. In a recent essay, Amanda Anderson notes that it behooves those of us who study Victorian material to be aware that any imposition of contemporary theory on such material has the potential to “forestall analysis of the ways in which Victorian subjects themselves conceived questions about critical detachment, which were fundamental to their own vexed encounter with the promises and challenges of modernity” (Anderson 44). But,

Kritsteva’s notion that modern subjectivity is always fluid and prone to revolution, an idea she developed after careful analysis of the work of avant-garde French writers of the late nineteenth century, is, I believe, eminently applicable to material created according to European models in this volatile period.

I sincerely doubt that that little English lady of my experience has ever had cause to think about our encounter of so long ago, and I am certain that she would be thoroughly surprised that it would surface as the impetus behind a literary project of this kind. But I have never been able to answer her question with any degree of lucidity. Her question created an aporia rather than a conversation because it was not framed in terms that applied to my experience. I was not, as she suggested, an interloper; according to the culture both she and I inhabited, I was supposed to be

5 That the acquisition of identity is a revolutionary rather than simply evolutionary process is one of the key tenets of Kristeva’s individuation theory and will be discussed in greater detail later in this project. 13 exactly where I was. And, as I have read the intellectually thrilling, brilliant narratives of self/other imperial identity construction posited by many postcolonial theorists, I have been dissatisfied with the identities assigned to writers like those of this study for much the same reason. The imaginative response of these women to the cultures they inhabited was complex.

In their fiction they grappled with the many difficulties produced by modern, imperial life, but they also imagined British imperial culture in other terms, as a system which allowed individuals to develop in ways they had never thought possible. Catherine Hall suggests that the great promise of our post-colonial moment, the “moment after Empire when British identities have to be imagined anew,” is in the possibility that we move beyond the narratives upon which the past has depended. As she notes, there is emancipatory potential in “unpicking imperial histories, grasping the raced and gendered ways in which inter-connections and inter-dependencies have been played out, developing a more differentiated notion of power than that which focuses simply on colonizer and colonized” (76). It is to such potentially emancipatory tasks that I will turn for the rest of this project. 14

Chapter I.

Narrating the Late Imperial Period, 1880-1940.

The period on which this study focuses encompasses the thirty years before the advent of

World War I, the War itself, and the interwar years. It is a section of the historical past that, until more recently, was often viewed as I have just described it—made up of distinctly different historical moments that developed in a cause-and-effect relationship. The underlying theme of many historiographical works which focus on this era, such as Modris Ekstein’s The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age and Martin J. Wiener’s English Culture and the Decline of the

Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980, is of the decline, death, and rebirth of British culture. In this scenario, the bourgeois liberalist culture of late-Victorian Britain produced but, for all intents and purposes was unable to support, the enormous economic, cultural, and social changes wrought by

World War I. Its demise was accompanied by social, economic, and cultural upheaval that gave birth to the culture of modernity, the culture that in many important ways continues to ghost our contemporary way of life. The pivotal moment in this interpretation of events is August 1914, the month in which European nation after European nation entered into the conflict that became

World War I. Considered by many to be “one of the most undeniable ‘natural breaks’ in history”

(Hobsbawm 6), August 1914 is a kind of historical punctuation point, one which marks the death of one culture and the birth of another.

Though designations such as “fin-de-siécle” and “Edwardian” attempt to soften this emphasis on rupture and use August 1914 as something other than the marker of modernity’s beginning or nineteenth-century bourgeois liberalism’s ending, a common approach has been to insist on the differences between pre-war and post-war cultures and describe their relationship in 15 terms of a difference of “worlds.” The frequent use of this all-encompassing and self-contained image to describe pre- and post-World War I experience is an indication of the enormity of the changes many people felt and continue to feel in regard to this period of history. So, for example, it was the loss of my “beautiful lovely safe world” (56) which Dick Diver mourned in

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1926 novel, Tender is the Night, and it is still the “loss of the world before

1914” (7) which Eric Hobsbawm discusses in his 1987 study, Age of Empire. This representation of the period as the loss of one world and the birth of another has tended to foster

“forward-looking” or “backward-looking” approaches to pre-1914 material by writers of many genres (Hobsbawm 7). Such approaches accept and even rely on the notions that the divide between the two periods was irrevocable and that after August 1914 the “world” which preceded it disappeared forever. The problem with this approach is that its insistence on a distinct divide between what came before and what came after the war does not help us account for the fact that a great deal of material was produced during the era which simply does not fit this paradigm. As the recent work of historians such as Jay Winter, Angela Woolacott, and Peter Mandler have shown, there are other ways this section of the historical past can and must be considered.

“Fantasy Echo” and “Women’s Time”

Before moving to a discussion of these other approaches, I would first like to turn to the lines of thought which underpin my own approach to this issue and place a recent essay by the historian, Joan W. Scott, into play with some of the pivotal tenets of Julia Kristeva’s theories of time and identity construction. Kristeva’s theory of subjectivity, particularly feminine subjectivity, in Western society will assist much of this project, but here I would like to concentrate on her notions of language and time. It is, I believe, not incorrect to claim 16 that,though there are some fundamental differences in their emphases and theoretical paths, both

Kristeva and Scott are reaching for a similar goal—an understanding of the way individuals and collectives use fantasy to narrate their identity in relation to time.

Julia Kristeva’s views on time and its relationship to identity are based in her theory of the unconscious as that which continually challenges and revolutionizes a subject’s coherence and assumed singularity. Because it is unpredictable, unknowable except in its effects,

“inaccessible to the mind and outside time” (Smith 60), Kristeva’s unconscious is anything but historicizable. It is the play of energies between the psychic threads of the unconscious and experiences registered in the symbolic and the semiotic that develops a subject’s identity. This constant play means that subjectivity is never a “static phenomenon captured in an imaginary form of one kind or another; it is also its unspeakable, unnameable, repressed form” (Lechte

142). Kristeva is not, therefore, interested in theorizing the unified subject as a static identity, but instead prefers to think about the “subject-in-process.” By this she means a subject who both submits to the laws of social being, including the law of spoken and written language, and who also “does not entirely submit, cannot entirely submit, does not want to submit entirely”

(Kristeva, Interviews 26). An individual’s unique subjectivity is created out of the constant flow between submission to and contestation of the law of the symbolic, an experience which continually reveals the symbolic’s inability to articulate experience which is registered in the semiotic. Only that renegade mechanism, fantasy, can help the subject articulate otherwise unnamable material registered in the semiotic and welling in the unconscious; but, because of the heterogeneous nature of that material, the narration it produces is always one “torn between the atemporality of the unconscious and the forward-moving flight of the story” (Kristeva, Time

326). 17

Though most of Kristeva’s analyses of the relationship between time and identity are embedded in discussions of works which she designates “poetic language,” her writings focus so frequently on the relationship between time and narrative that it is impossible not to see it as one of the foundational themes of her oeuvre. The one essay in which Kristeva does concern herself with the specific nature of history writing is her early essay “Women’s Time.” The main thrust of this essay is to insist that women of the second-wave feminist generation must learn how to weave together simultaneous, but mutually exclusive conceptions of time in order to take advantage of the space allowed them by a changed social contract. They must learn to manage the demands of maternal time, the time of motherhood which is cyclical, repetitious, and timeless, the time of “linear history, or cursive time (as Nietzsche called it)” and “monumental time,” the form of time necessary to imagine eternity, “globalization and/or uniformization transcending the nation” (Kristeva 188). But though Kristeva develops this distinction between kinds of time in the essay, her concern is less to theorize the nature of history writing than it is to counter what she considers abuses and mystifications of the category “woman” by the feminist movement. For this reason, only the introductory section explores the notion that the identities of individuals and social groups are both “a solidity rooted in a particular mode of reproduction and its representations” and “a fragility” since their necessary sense of universality depends upon echoes which filter up to them through “historical sedimentation” (Kristeva, “Women’s” 189).

Kristeva’s reticence to theorize the specific nature of writing about history is, perhaps, due to her sense that capturing the essence of specific moments in time is all but impossible. In

Time and Sense, she emphasizes that speaking about time “while it passes is a problem that circles in on itself, producing a painful cyclical motion in which the problem disappears in order to attain a rapture beyond words—and beyond time” (Kristeva 167). In other words, because 18 time both continually defines and eludes us in ways we feel but cannot always express, we cannot engage with it with any real satisfaction on the level of the symbolic alone. The discomfort the paradoxes of this engagement produce is something we need not necessarily answer or name, but we must certainly embrace it as an essential part of the human experience.

Our awareness of the inevitable passage of time is, Kristeva continually reminds us, part of the painful pleasure, the jouissance, of life, that which gives our existence real substance, meaning, and energy.

In many ways, Joan Scott’s essay, “Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of

Identity,” is a further exploration of some key ideas Kristeva proposed, but did not pursue, in

“Women’s Time.”6 In her essay, Scott considers how and why fantasy narratives—or, more particularly, what she calls “fantasy echoes”—are used in the construction of individual and collective identities.7 Central to this premise is her insistence after Michel Foucault that

“identities don’t preexist their strategic political invocations [because the] categories of identity we take for granted as rooted in our physical bodies (gender and race) or our cultural (ethnic,

6 Scott herself does not make this connection in her essay. She simply says that she has turned to “writings, informed by psychoanalysis, that treat fantasy in its unconscious dimensions” because of her dissatisfaction with the theories of fantasy more commonly used in history writing. These view fantasy as “synonymous with imagination,” a mechanism which “one directs . . . purposively to achieve a coherent aim, that the writing of oneself or one’s group into history, writing the history of individuals or groups” (“Fantasy” 287). In the essay, she mentions Freud, Laplanche and Pontalis, Slavoj Zizek, and Jacqueline Rose as sources for her formulation. Kristeva is mentioned, but Scott does so in order to critique her use of the maternal as “a utopian fantasy of sameness and harmony” (293). Though Scott does not connect her ideas to Kristeva’s “Women’s Time,” a comparison of the two essays does, nevertheless, reveal Scott’s clear indebtedness to Kristeva, even to the extent that Scott’s metaphors echo those used in Kristeva’s essay. 7 At first glance it may seem that Scott’s view of fantasy’s work is not wholly unlike Kristeva’s, but the fact that it is based on a wholly different understanding of the unconscious significantly changes the range of possibilities she can imagine for it. Central to Scott’s argument is an understanding of the unconscious similar to that of Jean Laplanche and Henri Pontalis. For these poststructuralist psychoanalytic theorists, the unconscious is historically transmitted, initially created out of and organized according to the child’s perception of its parents’ “enigmatic signification” of repressed desire (Campbell 8). To a lesser extent it is later dependent on a subject’s relationships with others. Though this approach has been criticized because, among other things, it implies that the internal world of the child can only originate in the world external to itself, it does uphold the possibility of an unconscious which, like Kristeva’s, is fed by the energies of both verbal and non-verbal experiences, an unconscious which always contains within it the possibility of revolution. 19 religious) heritages are, in fact, retrospectively linked to those roots; they don’t follow predictably or naturally from them” (Scott 285). In other words, the categories we use to develop our personal and social identities are themselves constructs that depend for their meaning on particular, historically specific definitions of their properties. Because such meanings are essentially volatile, Scott believes it is important for those of us who work with the historical record to remember that seemingly essential, natural, ahistorical categories—for her in this essay “woman,” but also “era,” “modernity,” “colonial,” etc.—are created in response to the needs of the historical moment which produces, reproduces, or reechoes them.

In other words, Scott is not interested in simply debunking and discrediting such categories as always potentially mythological and therefore suspect in nature. Instead, she wants us to turn our attention to the fact that the reoccurrence and work of such categories over time is evidence “from particular and discrete moments in time—of someone’s, some group’s effort to identify, and therefore mobilize a collectivity” (Scott 287). Fantasy echo is, therefore, an organizing mechanism which, as a form of fantasy, allows us to replay “in time and over generations the process that forms individuals as social and political actors” (Scott 292). By helping us elide complexities and discontinuities, it allows us to imagine impossible connections.

But it is also a mechanism which, because of the always imperfect nature of the echo, continually reminds us “that identity (in the sense both of sameness and selfness) is constructed in complex and diffracted relation to others” (Scott 292).

Thus, Scott’s argument is that fantasy echo establishes identity as an “historically defined subjectivity” (290) by allowing us to imagine connections between new and already existent fantasies. It is both the reproducer and masker of potentially unbearable contradictions because it simplifies and resolves antagonisms by imposing “sequential order on otherwise chaotic and 20 contingent occurrences” (Scott 290). History, itself, is a “fantasized narrative” where fantasy is

“at play in the articulation of both individual and collective identity” (Scott 292). And, fantasy echo is essential to the identity construction of individuals and groups because without it, it would be impossible to “transcend the specificity of their circumstances “ (292) and imagine themselves as part of a coherent temporal continuum—as part of a history.

Narratives of Modernity and the Modern

Given what Kristeva and Scott help us understand about the function of fantasy narrative in the construction of individual and collective identity, it is clear that the narrative of gradual decline, death, and rebirth which underlies many approaches to the period 1870-1940 cannot be considered the only possible one. The question Kristeva and Scott encourage us to ask is, “Why has this narrative had such an enormous following among those who have written about this particular period?” For critics who have addressed this question, it is clear that the popularity of this narrative in historiographical and literary works since 1918 actually has more to say about the motivations of those who did the writing and publishing than it does about the period itself.

The historian Kenneth O. Morgan goes so far as to argue that such a bias exists because the history of World War I “was hijacked in the 1920s by the critics, by the Union of Democratic

Control, by Keynes and Norman Angell, and the critics of the left” (152). Because of their zeal to write the history of the period according to a “lessons of history” model—World War I was a hopelessly failed endeavor that was only righted by the correct actions of World War II—such writers and historians have emphasized this single story of the period and “themselves have much to answer for” (Morgan 152). Morgan may be simplifying a complex process by placing 21 the blame for this single-minded reading on a particular political agenda, but it is true that the historical record simply does not support this single version of events.

For Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger, the “fixation” by many scholars on Britain’s supposed decline in the years preceding World War I is actually surprising considering “the plethora of innovative political, social and cultural developments that reshaped the country after the 1870s” (2). These scholars contend that Britons of the period were fully aware that their nation had moved from an industrializing to an industrial nation, and that many public debates of the era indicate they actively sought to come to terms with the potentially unlimited nature of economic growth in this new system. Even more importantly, “social, political, cultural and economic change came to be registered in an ever-expanding range of contexts” (Daunton and

Rieger 2), and, rather than diminish over time, these changes and their contexts multiplied in infinitely complex ways as the period progressed. Since constant change and infinitely multiplying choices are defining features of the period, it would seem that the problem for anyone thinking about the period is actually one of having to choose between and/or juggle an enormous number of possible narratives—rather than having to abide by one.

One increasingly common way Britons of this period conceived of this complex experience and the one which will be of greatest importance to this project was as ”modern” or the result of “modern times.” As the signifier for a particular section of the historical past, the term “modern” and its later incarnation, “modernity,” are the kinds of arbitrary temporal designations Joan Scott asks us to interrogate since they are often used as though they refer to a particular historical period which has stable, unchanging boundaries. But, in fact, the terms are anything but precise and have been used to designate a variety of historical periods and human experiences. In fact, one of the few unifying features of recent critical work on modernity 22 appears to be the conviction that modernity’s boundaries were and are inherently malleable, ever-expanding, and infinitely contestable.

Critics who focus on modernity have tended to define it according to both the historical occurrences which created it and the epistemologies which give it its distinctive character, but there are differences in the way critics weigh the comparative importance of these two elements.

For those who lean toward a temporal definition, its roots may be variously traced to the social and cultural changes brought about by Britain’s colonial expansion during the sixteenth century, the scientific revolutions in the seventeenth century, the drive toward reason, morality, and justice that characterized so many Enlightenment endeavors, and the changes wrought by World

War I. In his influential analysis of modernity, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, Marshall Berman divided it into three separate phases: 1500-1800, the 1800s, and the 1900s. The three phases are brought under the umbrella of “modern” by a narrative of progress: the years of modernity’s conceptualization are followed by its violent birth through revolution; it then spreads and affects life around the globe (Berman 16-17). For Walter

Benjamin, modernity is the result of the dialectical relationship between “traditional” and

“modern,” best imagined as the forward flight of an “angel of history” whose wings are caught in the winds of a storm “blowing from Paradise” (Benjamin 259). Though the angel’s face is turned toward the past where he sees “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of its feet,” he cannot stop to “make whole what has been smashed” (Benjamin 260). Instead, he is propelled irresistibly and unwillingly forward, unable to see what lies in the future (Benjamin 260). Thus, for Benjamin the modern moment is a concrete moment in time, but it is one marked by an awareness of the past and a sense of 23 helplessness as we find ourselves propelled into the future by forces over which we have no control.

In contrast, Michel Foucault defines modernity as “an attitude rather than an epoch” in that those who conceived of themselves as members of a modern world attempted to “place humanity and in particular human reason at the center of everything, from religion and nature, to finance and science” (39). As an attitude it is “a voluntary choice made by certain people,” a way of acting and behaving that at one and the same time “marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task” (Foucault 39). Foucault consciously distances himself from the concept of modernity as a “sensitivity to the fleeting present” or acceptance of oneself as “one is in the flux of the passing moments”; instead, it means “to take oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration” and the will “to ‘heroize’ the present” (40,41). Jürgen Habermas combines something of both these approaches and claims that modernity was formulated in the eighteenth century by the philosophers of the Enlightenment through “their efforts to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic . . . for the rational organization of everyday life” (9). He considers modernity an incomplete project, part of our contemporary condition, “because it continues to attempt its own redefinition through many instances and utterances of identification and projection” (Childs 17).

Appealing as these various accounts of modernity may be for some, they have recently come under fire from postcolonial theorists who question many of the assumptions upon which such theories are based. As Paul Gilroy describes it, “a reassessment of the relationship between modernity and slavery may require a more complete revision of the terms in which the modernity debates have been constructed than any of its academic participants may be willing to concede”

(46). Gilroy takes both Berman and Habermas to task for their relative indifference to the 24 complexities created by race in the modern experience. He notes that for these two critics

“modernity is apprehended through its counter-discourses and often defended solely through its counterfactual elements, yet their analyses remain substantially unaffected by the histories of barbarity which appear to be such a prominent feature of the widening gap between modern experience and modern expectation” (Gilroy 49). For Homi Bhabha, the value of the postcolonial critique of modernity is due to postcolonial theory’s ability to go beyond simply revaluing “the contents of a cultural tradition, or transpose[ing] values ‘cross-culturally’” (241).

Postcolonial theory’s interest in exposing the connections between constructions of a cultural self at the expense of an other means that it can introduce “another locus of inscription and intervention, another hybrid ‘inappropriate’ enunciative site” which allows for a thorough reworking of modernity. This third level of inquiry reveals instead of conceals the fact that “the hegemonic structures of power are maintained in a position of authority through a shift in vocabulary in the position of authority” (Bhabha 242). In other words, for the postcolonial world “the ‘value’ of modernity” is not to be “located, a priori, in the passive fact of an epochal event or idea—of progress, civility, the law.” Instead, it needs to be “negotiated within the

‘enunciative’ present of the discourse” (Bhabha 242). It encourages us to ask “what is the ‘we’ that defines the prerogative of my present?” (247).

Though each of these positions is certainly defensible and contestable, it is worth noting that in each case the term “modernity” is used to universalize and homogenize complex and complicated experiences. There is no question such terms are essential because it is impossible to elide and consolidate differences and complexities and so allow for collective identification without them. But, Joan Scott asks us to remember that such formulations are the result of fantasy echo and so reverberate differently according to who is using them when and for what 25 purpose. Martin Daunton and Bernard Rieger suggest that whatever approach we take to modernity, it is best understood as it would have been by those who lived it, “through close readings within specific locales and venues” (3). Only when we uncover something of the complex web of present and past elements that particular individuals and groups use(d) to narrate their identity as members of the “modern” world can we begin to understand what modernity meant for them and continues to mean for each of us.

The Beginnings and Endings of Modern Britain

And, in fact, one of the defining qualities of the period 1870-1940 was the way the term

“modern” came to be used. Prior to 1870, Britons tended to use the term “modern” when thinking about the economic, social, and cultural consequences of industrial development on their lives. Thinkers such as Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold evaluated contemporary life in different ways, but they all “concentrated on questions that considered the recent economic transformations as the most striking feature of British ‘modernity’” (Daunton and Rieger 2). From 1870 forward, Britons began to use the term “modern” to describe the characteristics of an increasing number of contemporary experiences. When they “talked and thought about themes as distinct as occultism, psychology, exhibitions, smoking, coal-mining, national character, female shoppers, mountaineering, or imperialism, they repeatedly resorted to the term ‘modern’ to describe their society” (Daunton and Rieger 3). What exactly that meant for each individual or collective depended on all manner of physical, social, economic, and psychological influences, but the public debates of the period show a general conviction that living in the modern world meant living with profound, all-encompassing, often unpredictable change. It is the all-pervasive nature of this change, the fact that at some level it affected all 26 sectors of public and private life, which gave contemporaries the sense that this historical moment was fundamentally different from those that preceded it.

As noted earlier, one of the ways Britons thought of modern experience—especially after

World War I—was in terms of its violent rupture or disjunction with the past; but, again, I would like to emphasize that this was not the only perspective. Though Britain engaged seriously and energetically in the many international conflicts and exuberances of the period, its economic, political, and social developments were somewhat different from those of most continental

European nations. Where most of the latter experienced economic, social and political upheavals that irrevocably and often violently changed the deepest fabric of their inhabitants’ lives, it can be argued that for many Britons the experience was far less disruptive (Mandler,

“Consciousness” 121). During this period, the British constitutional monarchy and the British class system remained relatively stable; economic change occurred gradually and steadily over a long period; Britain retained its primacy as an important and powerful international player; and, in general, the various social tensions of the period did not lead to revolution or total disruption of the social or political system (Daunton and Rieger 8-11). Although it is certainly true that there was a sense amongst Britons that this was a period like no other, for many contemporary observers the period was as much one of continuity and gradual evolution as it was of irrevocable change.

For this reason, Daunton and Rieger propose that instead of depending solely on the narrative of disruption and rupture which was common in continental assessments of the period,

“British debates about modernity encompassed [at least] two conceptions of ‘change,’ which either described transformations as radical breaks or cast them as relatively smooth forms of transformation” (12). These two strands of thought existed simultaneously and, it must be 27 assumed, allowed for assessments and perspectives that combined elements from both intellectual paths. Because most current theoretical models emphasize that experiences of discontinuity defined the “modern,” Daunton and Rieger suggest that “new approaches to modernity might therefore examine how historical narratives of continuity and discontinuity interacted not only in negotiations of the modern in Britain but elsewhere in Western Europe”

(15). It can only be through an engagement with the specificity of human experiences, multiple possibilities, and multiple narratives of change that we may garner an understanding of what it meant to be living in “modern times.”

An acceptance of a narrative of continuous evolution does not mean, of course, that

Britons were somehow not modern, blind to, or ignorant of the enormous changes occurring around them. In particular, the terrible experiences of World War I and the political and social upheavals that followed it posed major challenges to British narratives of continuity and gradual development. But, as Jay Winter has argued in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, even after the cataclysmic experience of World War I it was still possible for people to reach back to “the symbolic language of romantic, classical, and religious reference,” the culture of progress and enlightenment which had sustained Britons as moderns for at least 50 years, in order to make sense of their experience and find healing (228). Even so, it was impossible to ignore the social, political, and economic changes that resulted from the war. Though still a major international player, Britain found itself a weakened world power; the war had further unseated established notions of appropriate masculine and feminine behavior; social issues such as health care, poverty, and working conditions were sometimes violently debated; and always on the horizon was the turmoil taking place on the Continent. Yet, even in 1920, the situation was such that

John Maynard Keynes would write, “in England the outward aspect of life does not yet teach us 28 to feel in the least that an age is over. We are busy picking up the threads of our life where we dropped them” (2). In important ways modern life as Britons had known it could continue as it had.

But ultimately, the changes that were tangible during the interwar period placed enough strain on the narratives of modernity as historical continuity that after World War II it was no longer possible to use them to make sense of contemporary experience. As Julia Kristeva describes it, “the actuality of the Second World War brutalized [modern] consciousness through an outburst of death and madness that no barrier, be it ideological or aesthetic, seemed able to contain any longer,” and the result was that “our symbolic means find themselves hollowed out, nearly wiped out, paralyzed” (Black Sun 222,223). For this reason, Jay Winter argues that it was the close of World War II rather than World War I that marked a major turning point in the way individuals and collectives understood and articulated their experience. By 1945, the narratives of reason, progress, and morality upon which many modernities had long depended simply could no longer be used to make sense of contemporary experiences. Britons had to look to other elements of their culture, other narratives of identity, in order to secure their place in an ever- evolving world.

The Modernities of Empire

Nevertheless, throughout the period 1870-1940, Britons could still garner a sense of security, historical continuity, and their modernity from many traditional elements of their society, particularly the perceived stability of their institutions. The parliamentary system, prescriptive law, and, in particular, the constitutional monarchy all gained credence from the facts that they were long-established and yet relatively successful when it came to containing the 29 pressures exerted on them by the modern experience. By mid-century the Enlightenment notions of “universal human nature and cosmopolitan politics” which had given particular shape to

British attitudes and life in the earlier part of the century were being combined with “Burkean themes that stressed continuity and tradition” (Mandler, “Consciousness” 121). The result was that from mid-century onwards, Britons “still looked to wise, adaptive leadership rather than the common action of the collective to guide progress” (Mandler, “Consciousness” 121).

This preference was, to a certain extent, exploited by Queen Victoria and her various governments. Early in her reign Victoria recognized that “her people wanted to exert more control over the affairs of state” (Stimpson xiv), and this recognition precipitated a gradual shift in the way monarchs both served and were served by Britain’s increasingly democratic society.

To survive as monarch, Victoria learned to construct “effective patterns of royal representation and self-representation” which effectively “embodied a paradox—she would hold sway by playing out her willingness to give power away” (Stimpson xiv). As Victoria’s role in British life became increasingly symbolic, the monarchy’s ability to sway political policy simply by virtue of its position waned. Eventually, any real power Victoria and her successors had lay in their ability to lend stability to and center many disparate aspects of British life simply by appearing to be all that Britons held dear about their culture. As the very embodiment of historical continuity, Victoria was the touchstone for Britain’s narratives about its glorious past, its modern present, and its hope for success in the future.

But of all the institutions that molded British ways of life during this period, none reached further into the fabric of people’s everyday lives than the British colonial system.

Empires have been a fact of life for human beings since the beginning of time, but the colonial empires that developed during the nineteenth-century were an entirely new type. Between 30 approximately 1875 and 1914, great swaths of the world—particularly in Africa and Asia—were brought under the dominion of a handful of nations—namely Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the

Netherlands, Belgium, the U.S.A., and Japan (Hobsbawm 62). The conquest or annexation and subsequent administration of less powerful nations by more powerful ones was, in itself, not new, but in the nineteenth century the fact that the conquering nations were powered by highly successful and aggressive capitalist economies gave the endeavor a unique character. The complex web of economic relationships that connected and supported the conquering nations meant that as they acquired influence and power throughout the world, their combined efforts eventually created a single, global economy. In such a political and economic climate, no tiny

Pacific atoll or stretch of barren African desert was without meaning or interest for the conquering nations.

But, because the pace of this world economy was set by its developed or developing capitalist core, uneven relationships developed between the dominating “advanced” nations with their established capitalist economies and the dominated “backward” ones whose capitalist economies were, perhaps, “underdeveloped” or “developing” (Hobsbawm 56). Recent scholarship on this phenomenon has made much of what most certainly were concerted efforts by the nations of the “center” to thwart or hinder efforts by these “peripheral” nations to develop their market economies or become serious competitors on the world stage. As Katie Trumpener notes, “an empire lives from its peripheries; its economy and trade depend on their underdevelopment in relationship to the imperial center” (244). The peripheries provided fuel for the global market, but they did so as colonies, not as sovereign nations. Katie Trumpener talks of colonial spaces as “competing imperial service sectors” and notes that it was in the interest of the colonial center to hold these “in suspension” (244), thereby ingraining in their 31 cultures a sense of bondage to the center, encouraging economic co-dependency, and, where necessary, exploiting inter-colonial rivalries for political and economic purposes.

So, for example, when one former “agricultural society,” Canada, moved toward self- rule, it did not rely solely on its unique strengths and abilities as justification for such responsibility. Instead, it compared itself with other agricultural “possessions” such as India and

South Africa whose relations with England were far more troubled. This comparison enabled

Canada to develop a narrative of identity in which it starred as a model colony of the British empire, superior to colonies which were much better endowed with natural resources but unruly

(Trumpener 246). Such a model offspring was, it could be argued, deserving of its dominion status, while the others clearly were not.

The Trans-colonial World of Imperial Culture

Yet despite, England’s primacy, the situation was never such that England could keep itself wholly distanced from its colonial possessions and play them like marionettes completely subject to its will. As postcolonial theorists as diverse as Edward Said, Simon Gikandi, Homi

Bhabha, and Anne McClintock have shown, many of the elements the imperial center employed to administer its colonies and their economies bound center and peripheries in complicated, symbiotic relationships that influenced the way identities were constituted in every colonial locale.8 Though the sense that England was “central” and its colonies “peripheral” certainly survived throughout the period 1870-1940, the large-scale social displacements that result from

“economic unevenness, and from the need to anchor colonial authority with imperial armies and administrations” bound the peripheries and center to one another in complex and often

8 See Said, Gikandi, Bhaba, and McClintock. 32 unexpected ways (Trumpener 244). As goods, money, administrators, soldiers, merchants, colonists, and travelers went back and forth between the colonies and London, disparate cultures found themselves connected by “parallel modes of subordination” (Trumpener 244) which sought to contain the potential conflicts caused by cultural, political, and religious differences.

So, for example, the fact that the British colonial system built its economic strength on

“the systematic underdevelopment and impoverishment of [its] domestic colonies” produced the ironic situation where many “Scottish (and Irish) settlers misplace[d] in transit their age-old anti-

English, anti-British, and anti-imperial hatreds” and became willing participants in the subordination of other peoples overseas. This softening of national differences in the service of empire created a “strange cosmopolitanism” in colonial places and amongst the peoples who inhabited them which paralleled “(if on a much reduced scale) that of the imperial center itself”

(Trumpener xiii). The result was that as Britons moved between the places of empire, they could inhabit societies which in many crucial ways mirrored those of their home places; but, depending on where they were and what they were doing, there were enormous differences in the way their identities could be constructed. As Gayatri Spivak has so succinctly noted, “empire messes with identity” (226), but it is important to remember that this messing was not usually controlled. In most cases it was indiscriminate and the result of a mixture of conscious and unconscious experience, rather than the result of conscious choice.

Naturally, this does not mean that the hierarchies of power established by the discourses of race, class, and gender that supported the British imperial agenda were made moot or even softened by these transnational, trans-peripheral cross-pollinations. In fact, the differences between the “civilized,” economically developed center and the “uncivilized,” underdeveloped peripheries became an important way to legitimize Britain’s imperial project as a 33 representatively modern endeavor. By contrasting conditions in colonial arenas and in metropolitan Britain, proponents for empire and modernity could underline “how much further

Britain had supposedly traveled down the roads of ‘progress’ and ‘enlightenment’ in comparison with non-Europeans” (Daunton and Rieger 12). In addition, the grafting of British institutions, such as its educational system, its rule of law, and its religious culture, onto the lifeways of differently developed societies, meant that the goal of Britain’s imperial work could be viewed as a humane, civilizing mission. As a modern society working to establish other modern societies around the globe, Britain could rationalize and legitimize even the most oppressive of its actions against the cultures that had come under its control because such actions were seen as part of Britain’s effort to bring its colonial subjects into the modern arena.

Any discussion of the effects of trans-colonial travel and service on British and colonial identity construction during this period must take into account the fact that the people doing the traveling and serving were, for the most part, not indigenous peoples from Britain’s overseas colonies. Though a number of recent studies have documented the contributions and critical perspectives of Africans, Indians, West Indians, and other “natives” who traveled to and lived in the metropolis,9 the fact that race was an important qualifier when it came to accessing the privileges of power in most imperial hierarchies meant that the greater number of these inter- colonial travelers and sojourners were racially “white.” As Joan Scott has reminded us, what that term meant exactly depended on different criteria at different moments and places throughout the period, but there is no denying that whiteness and non-whiteness were essential identity categories for all colonial British subjects during this period, regardless of where they were, what they were doing, or when they were doing it. 34

Englishness, Britishness, Centers, and Peripheries

Another result of this inter-colonial cross-pollination was that, beginning in the mid- nineteenth century, the Enlightenment notions of universal brotherhood and enlightened authoritarianism that had given many members of Britain’s ruling center a way to narrate their position in the imperial schema began to lose their potency. These were gradually being replaced by the ideas of nationalism and democracy (Mandler, “Against” 160), ideas that also necessitated the development of a new way of thinking about and expressing the center’s commitment to and central role in the development of the modern world. A great deal of recent criticism has explored the development of a modern, national style during this period as the development of “Englishness,” an identity category which differentiated the core culture of the center from the more inclusive category, “Britishness.” 10 According to these critics, Englishness was developed as a way to keep the core, imperial culture from being overrun or irredeemably infected by the influences of the cultures it colonized—both at home and overseas. But, interestingly, these identity categories have at times been folded into one another so that

Britishness is equated with Englishness, Englishness/Britishness is the Self of the central culture, and those who are British are only those who are born on the lands between the coastlines of the

Isles. So, for example, Linda Colley describes the British as “a single people not because of any political or cultural consensus back home, but rather in reaction to the Other beyond their shores”

(Colley 6). This representation of events focuses on a narrative of anxiety about the purity of the race that certainly was one contemporary perspective, but in her effort to provide a simple answer to a very complex process, Colley also confuses a number of important identity categories and the experiences that relied on them.

9 For an interesting collection of such responses, see Caryl Phillips. 35

Peter Mandler notes that critical perspectives like Colley’s tend to emphasize, and even overemphasize, the “exclusive, anxious, and even neurotic qualities” of the period

(“Consciousness” 119). Its insistence on English and British exclusivism as the prime influence on identity construction during the period is difficult to reconcile with the trans-colonial perspective and narrative of modernity I have followed thus far. But the greater problem with this explanation is that its narrow definition of Britishness is only historically accurate for an extremely short period in British history, an omission which places in the “Other” category a whole slew of human experiences which those who did the experiencing would be surprised (and maybe offended) to see described that way.

In his recent study, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity, Ian

Baucom provides a new perspective on this question through his complex analysis of the ways

English and British identities were constituted throughout the empire during the period. Baucom centers his analysis around the fact that before the passing of the British Nationality Act by the

Thatcher government in 1981, the construction of British, English, and every other British colonial identity was based on the age-old British law of subjecthood: the ius soli, the “law of the soil” (8).11 For the greater part of nine centuries, the ius soli provided a very simple way to determine who counted as a British monarch’s subject and who did not: the question, Were you born on British sovereign territory? Though, of course, administrations throughout the period

10 See Colls and Dodd, Giles and Middleton, and Daniels. For an interesting critique of this stance see Mandler, “Against ‘Englishness.” 11 The 1981 British Nationality Act passed by the Thatcher government revised the terms by which Britishness was legally defined. Instead of remaining the “law of the soil,” the determining factor became, among other things, the place of birth of one’s grandparents, a change which determined that Britain was a genealogical community rather than one based on a territorial principle. As Baucom notes, “the 1981 Nationality Act codified a theory of identity that sought to defend the ‘native’ inhabitants of the island against the claims of their former subjects by defining Britishness as an inheritance of race” (8). At the same time it discarded “nine hundred years of legal precedent that recognized a territorial principle as the sole determinant of British identity” (Baucom 8). For a study of British nationality law, see Bevan and Dummett and Nicol. 36 found ways to exclude individuals who for some reason were undesirable,12 in legal terms, until

1981 individuals born on territory over which England claimed sovereignty could be considered and consider themselves British subjects.

The development of the category “British” was directly related to England’s need to find a way to both include and keep at a distance the communities it created and incorporated into its imperial system. As Baucom notes, prior to the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland, there actually were no “British” subjects, just “subjects who owed their allegiance to the monarch” (8), and it was this interpretation of subjecthood which became the basis for the later distinction between

British and English identity. Subjects had responsibilities to the crown, but they were not necessarily given the rights or protections provided by citizenship as we understand it today.

This distinction between subject and citizen was crucial to the development of the empire because it created a legal concept that proved “as elastic as the nation’s imperial boundaries” (8).

To be claimed as a British subject meant that one did not really have a choice in the matter—if the Empire claimed you, you were a subject whether you wanted it or not. But being claimed as a British subject did not necessarily mean having any claims to the services provided by the

British government.13 This clear and unambiguous divide between subject and ruler meant that despite the growing influence of democracy on the British culture of the center that I noted above, it did not seem incongruous to people that, among other things, colonial places were usually administrated according to an autocratic model of varying benevolence. Throughout the period 1870-1940, this legal standard of British subjectivity remained intact and allowed

12 Perhaps one of the most fanciful of these was, perhaps, the dictation test which potential immigrants to Australia were required to pass until the 1950s. It could be given in any modern or ancient European language and was initially geared to assist the implementation of the “White Australia Policy.” So, for example, in the 1903 it was completely legal to give one well-known German Communist leader the test in Greek. Even though he could speak German, English, and French, he was, therefore, denied immigration and imprisoned for six months (“Immigration.”) For an informative collection of articles on this issue see “Immigration Restriction Act 1901.” 13 For an interesting discussion of citizenship rights during the Victorian period see Hall, McClelland and Rendall. 37

England the rather amazing luxury of being able to at once “claim and disclaim the spaces and subjects of its empire” (Baucom 7). 14

The fact that the imperial center identified “as British [subjects] most, if never quite all, the individuals born on British sovereign territory” meant it was able to develop its empire into a

“global system that could incorporate local differences but not define itself by local difference”

(Baucom 8,10). And yet, as more and more peoples and places were brought under British rule, it became increasingly necessary to find ways to ensure the primacy of the culture of the center.

When stretched to its limit, even the strongest of elastics must break, and it was, in part, in order to contain such a danger that the discourse of “Englishness” was revived during the period of rapid expansion prior to World War I. For centuries Englishness had been a significant identity category for those born on its shores; but, as Joan Scott reminds us, each time such an identity category becomes an important element in a community’s shared cultural life, it is a fantasy echo, never quite the same as it was in a previous incarnation.

Ian Baucom notes that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the discourse of Englishness was not so much concerned with containing the dangers posed by empire as it was with the threat posed by the radical republicanist culture of post-Revolutionary France (30).

Many English responses to the French situation followed the leads of Edmund Burke and

William Wordsworth in valorizing “custom over theory,” “commonsense Englishness over totalizing Frenchness,” and most importantly “the resonant English locale [which had] the power to preserve Englishness against Enlightenment modernity” (Baucom 30). When the discourse of

Englishness reappeared as an important cultural element later in the nineteenth century, it was

14 This standard was modified later, most notably in the 1948 British Nationality Bill, which was the “last major piece of legislation that sought to assert the global dimensions of Britishness,” and the 1971 Immigration Bill, which instituted the idea of “partiality” to “allow itself to discriminate among various United Kingdom-and-Colonies 38 this latter element that proved to be of greatest value in shoring up England’s position as the

Empire’s modern political, economic, cultural, and emotional center.

The unique qualities of English space and English places and their influence on people’s actions have been treasured for centuries. Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” (1616) Oliver

Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” (1770), and much of Wordsworth’s poetry are but a few of the celebrations of the particular qualities of English place which mark it and those who live in it as different from all others. But where in the above examples the unique qualities of English place are thought to guard its inhabitants against contamination from outside, foreign influences, the problem for later proponents of Englishness was that the distinction between what was outside and what was inside was not so easily made. “As the British Empire continued to expand and consolidate itself and as England became more closely entwined with the cultures, peoples, languages, and products of the British Empire,” it no longer sufficed for Englishness to be thought of as bound to the geographical spaces of the English nation (Baucom 29). Though such spaces were still important, by the 1870s their function in the construction of English identity had changed dramatically.

In order to accommodate the complexities of modern, imperial life, the earlier notion of the auratic, identity-forming qualities of particularly English places was gradually expanded.

Though English place was still central to the discourse, it was not place “as a mere expanse, but something that contains and communicates a certain kind of tradition” (Baucom 18). Through their ability to transmit the time-honored, essential qualities of Englishness to individuals, auratic

English places connected individuals who were wrapped in the modern present with the essential

Englishness of England’s great traditions, occurrences, and peoples of the past. Though the

citizens by reserving a right of abode in the United Kingdom only for those who had actually been born in the United Kingdom or one of whose parents or grandparents had been born there” (Baucom 9,10). 39 exact nature of such places changed according to who was defining them, they were always evocative of a certain type of English tradition. They could be a Government House in Kingston, a cricket field in Wagga Wagga, a country house in Simla, or a school for boys in Cape Town, but they were always “tradition-soaked places” which “secur[ed] and bestow[ed] English identity”(Baucom 18). Englishness was envisioned as “an unbound seriality, as something that was not immanent in the blood, but as a kind of ‘second nature,’ as something that could be acquired or lost” (Baucom 20). The acquisition of Englishness did not necessarily occur as the result of a conscious will to adopt it or divest oneself of some other cultural affiliation based on place. Instead, it was more the result of experience that Julia Kristeva would say is registered in the semiotic. It was felt, but not easily articulable, measurable in its effects rather than in the degree to which one consciously adapted one’s behavior, and it was, therefore, not something that every individual could necessarily acquire in equal measure or the same way.15 This

Englishness was not concrete and, therefore, replicable; instead, it was essence-like, something that throughout the period shifted to accommodate and define the differences between England’s

“national ‘here’ and imperial ‘there’” (Baucom 37). Englishness may have been ephemeral in nature, but it was also thought to be real, clearly recognizable, transportable, and transferable if an individual had the inbred sensitivity necessary to acquire or recognize it.

The notion that certain English spaces had the ability to endow individuals with the identity-forming qualities that made them recognizably “English” had far-reaching effects on most, if not all, aspects of British life. Ian Baucom claims that while British space “bestow[ed] only a common name on all the empire’s subjects, English space [. . .] reform[ed] the identities not only of Britons but of all those, whatever their ancestry or place of birth, who were exposed

15 Ford Maddox Ford elaborates this principle with great emotion and detail in The Spirit of the People: An Analysis of the English Mind. 40 to it”—and were susceptible to it (18). To be recognized as English was to be recognized as a member of the ruling, central culture, an identity that throughout the empire brought with it access to privileges that other British subjectivities did not necessarily have. The preference for

English ways in British spaces was used to discriminate between those who were imagined to have them (or at least be able to absorb them in some fashion) and those whose race, class, gender, or some mixture of these three identity categories rendered them unable to absorb them.

Because the construction of race, class, and gender is always dependent on historically specific power relations and contingencies, and because modern Englishness was constructed in a patriarchal society where one’s whiteness and class of birth mattered, the norm against which

Englishness was measured was almost always that of the white, upper-class English male. It may be, as Ian Baucom claims, that by “creating an empire whose commercial, political, demographic, and cultural economies depended on a continuous traffic between the English here and the imperial there, England rendered its spaces of belonging [and, therefore Englishness] susceptible to a virtually infinite, and global, series of renegotiations” (38). But throughout this period and in most imperial places, to be recognized as an Anglo-English male with a good family pedigree was infinitely more preferable than to be recognized as anything else.

Of course, for those many British subjects who were not white, aristocratic Englishmen it was much more complicated and, perhaps, even more important to work out how and where their particular British identity fit on the matrix of British imperial hierarchies. As noted earlier, while the empire expanded through the annexation of more and more overseas territory, the various colonies, protectorates, and dominions used their relationships to the center and each other to formulate narratives of self at crucial points in their histories. Like all familial relationships, these were complex, shifting, sometimes harmonious, and sometimes combative;

41 but where inter-peripheral relations were to some degree optional, the relationship of each peripheral place to the center was inescapable. Whether one was a British subject in Afghanistan or Fiji, in some crucial way the British colonial self was always forged in relation to the English center. And, given the importance of place in the construction of Englishness, it was also important where one was born or with which colonial community one was affiliated. Despite the homogenizing qualities of the terms “British” and “colonial,” not all places in the Empire were thought of in the same way, and over time even those identities which seemed most stable would undergo pressure to change.

At various moments in their lives, and for very different reasons, the women writers who are the focus of this project engaged with many of these narratives of imperial modernity. Their complex, deeply-rooted, and ever-changing relationships with the colonial enterprise are reflected in their representations of England and Englishness in their fiction. But, it is their imaginative representations of the impact of colonial experiences on people’s lives which actually tell us more about Englishness, Britishness, centers, peripheries, and the whole gamut of identity affiliations produced by the British colonial system. 42

Chapter 2.

Rewriting English Courage : “Lucas Malet.”

If we assume that the “center” of the British Empire between 1870 and 1940 created modern, English culture, and that those who produced, consumed, and abided by the identity politics of that culture were the true inhabitants of the “center,” it would seem that Mary St.

Leger Kingsley Harrison, who wrote under the penname “Lucas Malet,” should have had little doubt about her position in the imperial schema. She was the eldest daughter of the multifaceted and immensely influential Charles Kingsley and a proud member of a privileged English family.

The Kingsleys were landless gentry who had served as Church of England clerics for generations. In addition, the family had provided the British imperial apparatus with a steady stream of administrators, regulators, educators, colonists. But even more important than all these practical contributions were the family’s many imaginative representations of Empire in their writings. Westward Ho! (1855) by Charles Kingsley; The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlin

(1859) by his brother, Henry Kingsley; South Sea Bubbles (1872) by Charles’ other brother,

George Kingsley; Damaris (1916) by Lucas Malet; and Travels in West Africa (1897) by

Malet’s first cousin, Mary Henrietta Kingsley; these are but a few examples of the Kingsley family literary output on colonial themes. In these works, the Kingsleys explored the virtues, problems, and possibilities of the British colonial enterprise, and through their writings they were instrumental in bringing some version of the British colonial experience to many Englishmen and women.16

16 In her memoir Thirty Years in Australia, the Australian writer Ada Cambridge noted that during her preparations for immigration to the colony in 1870 Henry Kingsley’s Geoffry Hamlin had been her “sheet anchor” (1). Even so, she does admit that the novel could not really prepare them for what was to come, and she and her husband could only imagine the Australian Bush to be “a vast shrubbery, with occasional spears hurtling through it” (Cambridge 2). 43

But though I have emphasized the family’s colonial works here, the representation of

British colonial cultures was hardly a central preoccupation for most of the Kingsley writers.17

The more prominent of them—Charles and Henry Kingsley and Lucas Malet—certainly did use their knowledge of colonial experiences in their works, but this was usually done in order to highlight the influence of increasingly complex modernity of English culture. During their lifetimes, each of these writers was to some degree empowered and constrained by the enormous social changes occurring in England, and imaginative representations of the colonial theater became a way to express the various emotions that modern English life in England evinced for them and their contemporaries. The fact that they were prominent members of a quintessentially

English Victorian family meant that they were usually recognized as such, and this had interesting repercussions for both their personal and professional identities.

A Father’s Daughter.

As the daughter of Charles Kingsley, Lucas Malet should—by virtue of her birth and breeding—have felt as in the “center” of imperial culture as any woman could possibly feel.

From both sides of her family, Malet’s cultural heritage was undeniably English, and her father’s influence on the production of English identity was significant during her early life. Charles

Kingsley is thought of as “one of the primary architects of the ideological and literary structures” of the Victorian period (Srebrnik, “Resubjection”195). Strong-minded, prolific, multi-talented, and passionate, he was a well-recognized public figure and a successful novelist, essayist, and

17 The Kingsley writer for whom colonialism and its effects was a central preoccupation was Mary Henrietta Kingsley, who after her parents’ death took part in several scientific expeditions to Africa. She wrote extensively about her African experiences and is credited with revolutionizing “the attitude toward Africa of British officials and the informed public” (Flint). Throughout her traveling years, Mary Kingsley remained uneasy about the relationship of her public actions to contemporary ideals of feminine behavior, and she died after contracting enteric fever while nursing soldiers in South Africa during the Boer War. The Royal African Society was founded as a tribute to her scholarly contributions after her death (Stevenson). 44 poet. He was a leading proponent of “Muscular Christianity,” a patriotic and particularly English form of Protestantism. “Muscular Christianity” owed much to Darwinian evolutionary theory and associated “physical strength, religious certainty, and the ability to shape and control the world around oneself” (Donald Hall 7). This model of Christianity was extremely useful to the colonial enterprise in that it advocated and justified Britain’s colonial aggression through its emphasis on the “strong man, Christ Jesus—stern because loving—who does not shrink from punishing, and yet does it as a man would do it, ‘mighty to save’” (Kingsley I 211).

During her father’s lifetime, Mary St. Leger Kingsley did behave as a representative, middle-class, Victorian Englishwoman. She took great pains to respect her father’s wishes in all aspects of her physical and intellectual life, and did little to shake the impression that she was, indeed, Charles Kingsley’s daughter. As she once noted, Charles Kingsley “held the old- fashioned and chivalrous notion that women should be treated en princesse, should be provided for, worked for, not permitted to struggle with world at first hand” (Dolman 147). It was this credo plus his taste and opinions on all things which colored and formed her world. Novels were

“absolutely forbidden […] until she was over twenty years old” (Dickens 523), and when she did read works of science and theology, she trusted in her father’s knowledge so implicitly that when in need of information she “simply asked [her] father questions instead of going to a dictionary of encyclopedia” (Dolman 148). She studied art at the Slade School for a time, but at the age of twenty-three she was encouraged to drop her studies and marry the man of her father’s choice,

Charles Kingsley’s one-time curate William Harrison. Thus, instead of becoming an artist earning her own living, Mary St. Leger Kingsley found herself a rector’s wife living in the

Clovelly parsonage where Charles Kingsley had grown up. In all outward aspects she seemed an icon of Victorian stability and respectability, an obedient daughter and wife. And yet, the 45 choices she made after the death of Charles Kingsley in 1876 seemed to belie that there was ever any truth in such an identity.

The Birth of “Lucas Malet.”

Although Lucas Malet did not actually write in a culture in which her father’s influence dominated, there is no doubt that Charles Kingsley was an influence Lucas Malet had to deal with throughout her life. She first began to write in 1881, some years after her father’s death, and by that time Charles Kingsley’s influence on English culture had waned significantly.18 Yet, throughout her career, Malet would find herself associated with his name. In reviews and interviews she was often listed as “Charles Kingsley’s daughter,” and it perhaps for this reason that she took every possible opportunity to make it clear that there were important differences between Charles Kingsley and herself. Malet always took pains to recognize her father as a writer of some stature, “a fine scholar . . . who saw things from the poetic and romantic, rather than the purely scholastic point of view” (Dolman 148). But when asked about her literary influences, she would list “Balzac, Gautier, Flaubert, and De Maupassant, . . . Loti in the French, and (in translations) Turgenieff, Tolstoi, and Dostoieffsky [sic.]”(Dolman 149).

In choosing her pseudonym, Lucas Malet also made a conscious choice to deflect attention away from her connection with her father and the unrepentantly English Kingsley and

Grenville lines of the family.19 Her writing persona was created out of the names of her paternal grandmother, Mary Lucas, and an unmarried great-great-aunt Miss. Malet. Both these women were colonials in that they were born and bred in the West Indies, and Malet insisted that “it was

18 Though his historical novels and The Water Babies were widely read until the beginning of the 20th Century, Charles Kingsley’s influence on English society had actually begun to wane some time before his death. His biographer, Patrick Scott, notes that it was his ill-fated dispute with Cardinal Newman over Catholicism in 1864 which made him “look like a prejudiced fool” and turned the tide of his public fortunes. 46 probably from them that the wits of the family came” because they were “exceptionally clever”(Dolman 149). By allying herself so clearly with the female colonial line of her inheritance, Malet consciously tried to distance herself from the male Kingsley authors, who gleaned an enormous amount of stability from their identities as thoroughly English

Englishmen. But in one interview, Malet emphasized the un-English, unmasculine source of her family’s talent by claiming that “we,” by which she meant all Kingsleys including her father,

“inherited whatever brains we have” from her father’s great aunt, Miss Malet (Halsey 69).

Though later in life Malet did relent and say that she felt herself “grow nearer and nearer to her father with every year she live[d]” (Gilman 524), she still refused to admit to the importance of her English identity. Instead she looked again to her colonial roots and claimed “that certain

Irish traits which [were] her family’s inheritance grow stronger and stronger within her” (Gilman

524).

In 1902, Malet also made the remarkable decision to convert to Catholicism. This was unusual given the centuries-long vilification of Catholics by English society, but it was even more remarkable given her family’s intricate connection to the Church of England. Her beloved father had thoroughly demonized Catholicism in fiction and religious writings throughout his life, and her husband remained a Church of England rector until the end of his. In her writings,

Malet often alluded to the fact that the religion of the English middle class, which she called

“Puritanism,” created enormous problems for English writers because it “insists on our wearing, or pretending to wear, blinkers, so as to see nothing that is inconsistent with its preconceived moral scheme” (Archer 220). She felt that Catholicism allowed her to go beyond “the necessity of rationalism” and focus on “life as a whole” (Archer 220).

19 Mary Harrison’s mother, Fanny Grenville, was from the Grenville family famous for its warring exploits during the Elizabethan period. 47

Perhaps not surprisingly, Malet’s personal relationship to England, English and society became increasingly uneasy after her father’s death, and once her literary career was established, she took every possible opportunity to live on the Continent for long periods of time. Before

World War I, she regularly spent her winters in the south of France—ostensibly due to her poor health—and after the war, she lived in Villeneuve, Switzerland, the village where Henry James,

Robert Hichens, and Romaine Rollande also spent appreciable amounts of time. Malet often wrote disparagingly of the educated English middle-class in England because, as she told

William Archer, it had “lost its primitive instincts” (Archer 233). The problem was, she noted rather wryly, that just as “le soir tous les chats sont gris,” the English middle class was dully conformist and lacking in “romance” (Archer 233).

Later in life Malet clearly felt more at ease in the international expatriate communities which she joined on the Continent, and her protégé Gabrielle Vallings wrote that “when living abroad, she mixed in an intellectual and brilliant cosmopolitan set of persons, by whom her wit and wisdom were highly valued” (Vallings 9). Vallings implies here that Malet’s difficulties with England were due to English society’s lack of appreciation for Malet’s unique character and abilities, and though this was probably true to some extent, later in her career there was also a more pragmatic reason for staying in Switzerland—she did not have to pay British income tax.

Yet despite Malet’s anomalies of thought, action, and creed, her English critics and reviewers always claimed her as an English author whose profoundly psychological representations of modern, English life, though perhaps uncomfortable, were indisputable “proof of her predominant position in the ranks of English novelists” (W. Courtney, Feminine 111).

As a writer, Lucas Malet enjoyed enormous artistic and financial success and was described more than once as “one of the greatest” women writers of her era, “comparable even in 48 some respects with George Eliot” (W. Courtney, Feminine 95). Due to her choice of decidedly

“unfeminine” themes, she also achieved a certain notoriety and was considered an important member of the English literary avant-garde by her contemporaries.20 She was a friend and colleague to Henry James and Thomas Hardy, both of whom admired her work and reworked some of her ideas to create masterpieces of their own.21 Her death was of such popular interest that it was recorded in newspaper headlines throughout England, Scotland, and Wales (Srebrnik,

“Lucas Malet”), and the Times noted in its tribute to her that “in the literary history of the past quarter of the nineteenth and the first quarter of the twentieth century Lucas Malet can hardly be denied a secure place” (qtd. in Srebrnik, “Lucas Malet”). In other words, in her lifetime Lucas

Malet was definitely a somebody, the daughter of Charles Kingsley, but also a self-sufficient artist whose representations of modern life clearly spoke to the needs and expectations of her contemporaries.

“Lucas Malet” and the Other Side of Englishness

And yet, if we think of the culture of the center only as a stabilizing element for the

British colonial world, only as the rarified “Home” to which millions of Englishmen, women, and their offspring looked longingly when faced with the vagaries of life in far-flung colonies, then Lucas Malet and her fiction seem a strange and uncomfortable fit. Lucas Malet’s novels were not for the faint of heart. During her lifetime, she was thought of as a writer who clearly understood the difficulties of the modern, English experience, but she was also criticized for her concentration on what some critics saw as the unpalatable and “abnormal”—the spiritually,

20 See Gilman, Dolman , J. Courtney, and W. Courtney. 21 Talia Schaffer has made an extensive study of the similarities between Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Malet’s The Wages of Sin and James’ The Sense of the Past and Malet’s The Gateless Barrier. In Schaffer’s opinion, the degree 49 ethically, and physically deformed, the sexually depraved, and the supernatural. The fact that this concentration was clearly a conscious, artistic choice did not ease many reviewers’ discomfort, and it was gradually seen as a kind of unhealthy compunction on Malet’s part. Her otherwise staunch supporter, Janet Courtney, eventually noted, “it is not impossible to acquit

Lucas Malet of a deliberate wish to shock average susceptibilities by the choice of a theme, essentially cruel and running counter . . . to the healthy instincts of the higher types of humanity”

(“Lucas Malet’s Novels” 540).

And Malet would probably not have disagreed. She herself explained this preference for the “abnormal” was the natural outcome of her belief that her “characters must be real . . .; their doings cannot be arbitrary, but must spring from what seems, to me at least, an inward necessity”

(Archer 224). In other words, in her estimation, her focus on the abnormal was not due to her perverse character, but her need to take her characters and their actions to their logical, “real,” scientifically verifiable conclusion. Malet knew that human life is rarely straight-forward or in many ways ideal, and this meant that in her works there is also a concentration on the fluidity that connects the tangible and intangible of human experience, a focus which foreshadows the work of contemporary feminist psychoanalytic thinkers, such as Julia Kristeva.

Malet’s desire for verisimilitude also meant that her representations of England, English society, and English people were rarely complimentary. Though she was born and bred in the

English countryside—mostly at Eversley, her father’s parish in Hampshire and at Clovelly in

Devon, where her husband took over her Kingsley grandfather’s parish—one does not often read of nightingales twittering happily in the thickets or of blithe spring mornings in her work.

Instead, there are choking fogs, disease-producing rains, and black-rutted, frosty roads that vex,

to which these male modernists “borrowed” from Malet’s materials was so extensive and acknowledgement for this indebtedness so lacking that these men’s actions border on being literary crimes. 50 thwart, and make even the simplest task difficult for her characters. And things get worse in the city where soupy darkness, biting winds, and ominous rushing crowds regularly confound and confuse characters’ intentions. When Malet does describe English place in terms of its beauty, she usually writes in an unease which is later revealed to be justified because of the existence of a sublimated evil of supernatural or all-too-human kind. In other words, English place is usually troubled and troubling in Malet’s novels, rarely salutary or sanctifying as in the work of many of her contemporaries, such as Ford Madox Ford.

A Rebellion or An Analysis?

In her analysis of Malet’s work, Patricia Srebrnik explains Malet’s apparent rejection of

English soil, culture, and religion as her rebellion “against her father’s plans for her” and the very high-Victorian culture he had helped to created (“Resubjection” 195-196). Srebrnik relies, here, on Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s reading of Freud’s model of the psychosexual development of the female artist, a model in which “female submission or resistance to the law of the father” is the central component of individuation (196). As she searches for a way to express herself, the female artist realizes herself enmeshed in what Christine Froula calls patriarchy’s “hysterical cultural script . . . that dictates to males and females alike the necessity of silencing the woman’s speech when it threatens the father’s power” (112). The result is that the female artist must constantly oscillate between “allegiance to literary fathers and longing for literary mothers” and live and create in a state of constant psychological ambivalence. She remains torn between “desire and defiance, exuberance and anxiety” (Srebrnik, “Resubjection”

196) and can never successfully mediate a position which incorporates and thus stabilizes the demands of both these positions. Srebrnik believes that for Lucas Malet this ambivalence would 51 have been exacerbated by the important role her father played in the literary, spiritual, and philosophical life of his generation, and she explains all of Malet’s actions as rebellion against

Charles Kingsley and the high Victorian society he helped construct.

In order to insist, as Srebrnik does, that when Malet wrote, she was primarily rebelling against her father and the demands of a society of his creating, we have to ignore the fact that when Malet wrote, she lived in very different world from the one her father had inhabited, a fact of which she was very conscious. I do not mean to imply that Charles Kingsley did not influence

Lucas Malet in any way, but Srebrnik’s equation of “the law of the father” with Charles Kingsley is a serious oversimplification of a complex Freudian theory. By ignoring the fluid nature of subjectivity and culture, Srebrnik can only read Malet and her writing in terms of a subjection/rebellion binary, the very way of thinking Malet fought to dissolve and disprove throughout her life.

The psychoanalytic theorist whose work seems more appropriate in this case is Julia

Kristeva because her approach side-steps a narrowing into binaries and takes into account the possibility of the psychic, physical, and spiritual fluidity of the individual. What Kristeva proposes is that, unlike a male child, the female child cannot transpose her primal relationship with her mother’s body into heterosexual relationships, a situation which means she remains

“caught between the sensible and the signifier” (Smith 92). Women cannot repudiate their desire for semiotic experience, but the demands of the symbolic require her to “desire a strange, illusory, masculine order signified by the phallus”(Smith 92). The paradox of this situation means that women often feel estranged from the culture of the symbolic. But this is not necessarily felt to be a burden or limitation because it can allow them to reconcile with the experience of functioning within the symbolic while simultaneously deriving identity from the 52 semiotic. The female subject who is able to reconcile to this configuration lives in a constant state of flux between adherence to the demands of the illusory but indispensable phallus and the draw of the deeply resonating, unrepresentable semiotic. Kristeva suggests that this complex experience reveals itself in the “strange, disillusioned, and yet lively and reliable air of certain women” (“Extraneousness” 106).

“Too Much Personality to Put in a Corner”

“Strange, disillusioned,” “lively and reliable” are certainly versions of the sentiments interviewers expressed about Lucas Malet. Dorothy Foster Gilman described her as having “too much personality to put in a corner” (1); Janet Courtney called her “positively startling”

(Women 44); and Mary Angela Dickens claimed that Malet “is heavily charged with ‘demonic influence,’ and when you wish to put her in a nutshell, it becomes confusing” (523). Though these descriptions are not entirely flattering, they do indicate the forcefulness and uniqueness that must have been important elements of Malet’s personality. These are also the kinds of terms that critics used when talking about the complex, often disturbing qualities of her novels.

Most assessments of her work focus at some point on the success of her novel The

History of Sir Richard Calmady, which appeared in the middle of her writing career and embroiled her in a heated debate. Some critics saw the novel as “an undeniable masterpiece; others . . . denounced the book as unsavory, gruesome, and repulsive” (Srebrnik, “Lucas Malet”).

Sir Richard Calmady was named one of the sensations of the year and garnered immense praise from all corners of the critical spectrum; and yet, it also marked a turning point in the way critics engaged with Malet’s work. Talia Schaffer notes that this novel “heralded the arrival of a new subject matter for literature, introduced in the newest styles,” and this was actually a problem for 53 the critics who “found it difficult to evaluate the novel because its manifest virtues were precisely the ones most inappropriate for a female author” (242).

Instead of continuing to regard her as a serious contributor to English letters, her ciritics began to view her as a kind of deviant. She was a female writer whose work could be so

“astonishingly virile” that it could “almost cheat the elect into believing that it was a great book”

(Macarthur 1160); but she was also someone whose concentration on the “unhealthy” elements of human nature and society was “not the mark of a same and healthy mind” (Janet Courtney,

Women 537). Obviously, being “lively and reliable’ and “strange, disillusioned” had its limits in the society Malet inhabited, and she came up against those limits very clearly at the same moment she realized her greatest success.

One result of this paradoxical development is that the commonly told tale of Malet’s creative life parallels the narrative of declinism that is, as I have noted earlier, one of the prominent historiographical perspectives on Britain during the era 1880-1940. It is the story of gradually increasing creativity, a marvelous pinnacle, followed by a steady decline into eventual obscurity. In this narrative, Malet breaks into the English literary scene with a modest success, writes increasingly better novels until she peaks with Sir Richard, and then writes nothing of much remark afterwards. But, just as it is possible to focus on the continuities rather than the decline and disjunction of the historical period, it is possible to do the same for the story of

Lucas Malet’s creative life. As late as 1925 Malet was important enough in trans-Atlantic literary circles that she was sought out for interviews by reporters such as Dorothy Gilman, and in 1920 she was listed as an important contributor to the Daily Telegraph’s philosophical debate on the state of “human progress,” a debate initiated by the loaded question “Is it a New World?”

(W. Courtney vi). Thus, it would seem that in her later career Malet was considered much more 54 than just a “has-been,” and that her opinion meant something to her contemporaries. Since my interest in this project is in Malet’s framing and use of English and colonial identities at important moments in her career, I will side with the notion that there were continuities and interesting developments in her writing throughout her career, a move which allows me to now turn to some novels which have lain ignored for decades.

A writer’s fortunes are usually more indicative of the tastes, mores, and prejudices of a particular historical community than the quality of his or work, and it is with this in mind that I now turn to three of Malet’s novels: Mrs. Lorimer, a Sketch in Black and White (1882),

Deadham Hard: a Romance (1919), and The Private Life of Mr. Justice Syme: a Novel . .

.Completed by Gabrielle Vallings (1931). Each of these works was created in what I assume to have been important moments in Malet’s writing career. Mrs. Lorimer was Malet’s first novel, the work through which “the writer and literary personality “Lucas Malet, as distinct from

Charles Kingsley’s daughter, came into existence” (Dickens 523); Deadham Hard was created during the latter part of World War I when Malet’s reputation as a writer of “serious” fiction was very much intact; and Justice Syme was Malet’s last novel, written as she battled the cancer that she knew would eventually take her life. The novel had to be completed by Malet’s protégé,

Gabrielle Vallings, a second cousin who was sixteen years her junior and Malet’s companion for forty years. Though there is a span of approximately fifty years between the first and the last of these works, there are some astounding similarities in theme and focus which ask us to refocus our assumptions about the nature of the culture of the imperial “center.” 55

Mrs. Lorimer; a Sketch in Black and White (1882)

Of all Malet’s novels, Mrs. Lorimer, a Sketch in Black and White is the one which elicited the most homogeneous response from her critics and reviewers. Janet Courtney’s comment that “one is struck with the beauty of the conception and the concentrated force which goes into its realization” (“Lucas Malet’s Novels” 534) is echoed in one way or another throughout the criticism. And there appears to be a general agreement that the “delicate refinement” of the piece is due to her focus on “a purely spiritualistic problem” (J. Courtney,

“Lucas Malet’s Novels” 534). On the surface, the novel adheres to the mores and conventions of nineteenth-century women’s writing in the thoughtful, realist style of George Eliot, and most critics have read it as an anti-feminist novel promoting the repudiation of New Woman values.

But if we look at what the novel says about modern woman and her place in English patriarchal culture, it is clear that Malet is making a complex argument about the choices women have to make in a society which depends on and perpetuates either/or identity categories—either black or white, either male or female, either feminist or traditional, either rural or urban, etc. Such a society prefers not to accommodate the kind of fluidity between identity categories which Julia

Kristeva has claimed is the natural state of women in modern, patriarchal society, and, as Malet shows, this situation is particularly difficult for women who do not find some way to mediate the strictures of this double-bind.

When Lucas Malet wrote Mrs. Lorimer, she was twenty-seven years old, had given up her study of painting to marry the man her father preferred,22 and was living in Clovelly, a country town at some distance from an urban center or even a railway station. When she did travel, Malet tended to go to France or Switzerland rather than stay in London, and it was only 56 later in life, after the death of her husband, that she kept a home in Hampstead. In all her writings, Malet was unapologetic about her belief that “consciously or unconsciously, you cannot but put yourself, so to speak, into your books—that is to say, your personal experience and surroundings dominate them” (Dolman 146). So it is no surprise that in Mrs. Lorimer it is the

“local color” of Clovelly and its surroundings rather than the urban spaces of London which dominates. As a place, London remains shadowy, featureless, purely a background to the intimate living spaces that Elizabeth and her sister-in-law create there, while Claybrooke abounds with people, animals, landscape, and weather, all of which are shown to have some influence on the actions of the characters.

Yet, despite its fullness and specific contours, Claybrooke is presented as insular, inward- looking, and a world interested it nothing but itself. As the narrator wryly notes, “all Europe might have been given over to fire and sword, and Claybrooke, meanwhile would have remained serenely neutral, so long as bread did not ‘go up,’ and beasts fetched a fair price at Slowby market on Thursdays” (ML 3). It is a place devoted to the maintenance of its traditions and lifeways because “outside the sacred circle of neighbourhood nothing appeared very interesting or important” (ML 4). The action of the novel takes place in the 1870s and early 1880s, well after the Reform Bills of the 1830s and the social upheaval that followed. Even so, hierarchies of class are upheld by custom rather than law, and one’s social position is irreversibly assigned at birth.

Interestingly, Britain’s colonialism has no influence on the lives or thinking of this community. This is worth noting because Claybrooke, though placed in Midlandshire, is modeled on Clovelly, Devon, the same place Charles Kingsley imagined to be the source of real,

22 William Harrison served for many years as Charles Kingsley’s curate. He was thirteen years older than Malet and after their marriage, he took over the Clovelly living where Charles Kinsley’s father had served when the latter was 57

English pluck. It is the kind of place whose wholesome English qualities produced Amayas

Leigh and the other English heroes from Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho!, but in Malet’s novel no one has family in any colonial position, and there is absolutely no mention of any colonial place or product. The myopic focus of the community means that “most of the natives of

Midlandshire feel a little insecure out of their own country, and would appear, for some occult reason, to have a considerable suspicion of foreign travel” (ML 47). By “foreign” travel, the community means travel to countries in Western Europe such as Paris, Italy, Germany, and

Switzerland. And when someone does return from such foreign travel, like Elizabeth Lorimer, they are considered slightly tainted. The fact they moved off the commonly trod path makes them appear wanting in appreciation of Claybrooke’s “high privileges” (ML 4).

In contrast, the world of the city is inherently cosmopolitan and unconcerned with traditional expectations. Elizabeth’s sister-in-law Fanny Lorimer thinks nothing of taking her children to Switzerland in order to escape the heat of summer and to the south of France in order to escape the cold of London’s winter. The borders between European spaces are nothing more than a means for momentary physical orientation, and Fanny’s Paris dresses are apparently as easily bought and delivered as her London ones. The Lorimers are “people who live by their brains and their talents, instead of their means” (ML 45), and as such exist in a world where heritage and social precedence matter little. Elizabeth’s husband Robert was a barrister before his death, his brother Frank is a newspaper editor, and Fred Wharton is a professional portrait painter. None of them has aristocratic connections, and yet they hob-nob as easily with the urban aristocrats as with people of their own class. This easing of social barriers means that after the insular, tradition-laden atmosphere in Claybrooke, Elizabeth finds “herself expanding pleasantly in the intelligent and genial atmosphere of the Frank Lorimer’s house. It was enjoyable to be

a young man. 58 with people of her own age, to feel that she might say what she liked without fear of treading on forbidden ground” (ML158).

In addition, the city allows Elizabeth to experiment with her identity in a way that would have been impossible in Claybrooke. When she moves to London, she makes the decision to create a new life for herself. But in order to do this, she has to consciously renounce “her duty to her aunt and uncle and her duty to her husband,” both of which “were, in some strange way, linked together” (ML 138). To live “largely rather than ideally” (ML 139), Elizabeth feels she must break her ties with her past because that life “was far too vast and multitudinous and dark for her to try to comprehend it all” (ML 136). Elizabeth equates Claybrooke with a complex and unyielding mesh of people, experiences, and memories which cling to her and make it difficult for her to follow her desires. But the city, with its formlessness and social instability seems to offer a wholly different set of possibilities. Where in Claybrooke, her role is clearly defined by social expectation and traditional precedence, in the city, Elizabeth believes she can “cast her sorrow behind her, and throw herself entirely on the future” (ML 137-138).

Interestingly, the fact that she has “no distinct talent to which she could devote her powers,” though a problem for Elizabeth herself, is also not a problem for London society. In the city where the lack of traditional lifeways softens the need for traditional social roles,

Elizabeth’s “house, and face, and circumstances, began to make her quite a reputation in a certain set” (ML 176). In other words, the fact that she is a pretty, young widow in a pretty setting is reason enough for her to become an icon of sorts, an aesthetically pleasing figure who is interesting because of her unusual circumstances. The catch is, of course, that in order to stay interesting she has to remain as she is, frozen in the pathetic but somehow tantalizing role of a young, independently wealthy widow. Because her widowhood and inheritance conveniently 59 remove her from the marriage and labor markets, Elizabeth is able to stand outside the normal demands placed on young women by urban, middle-class society. This means that as long as in

London society’s eyes she remains connected to the memory of her husband—the black of mourning—and does not try to cross back into the world of romance—the white of marriage— her independent, urban life is socially acceptable.

Malet sets up a situation in which for Elizabeth English society seems sharply divided into two spheres—the country and the city—each of which functions according to its own set of rules and defines itself as that which the other sphere is not. For wholly different reasons, each sphere insists on its superiority over the other and views its other with suspicion. Though Mrs.

Mainwaring, Elizabeth’s country-bred aunt, has no real knowledge of Elizabeth’s husband’s relations, the fact that their “standpoint was so radically different from her own” means that she reckoned it “almost her duty to wean Elizabeth” from them (ML 46). And Fanny Lorimer, who is city bred, cannot imagine that anyone could be anything but “nearly bored to death” in

Claybrooke (ML 146).

The result is that Elizabeth, who feels that different parts of herself belong to both spheres, eventually finds herself in an impossible situation. Each sphere demands her complete acceptance of its rules and mores and unquestioning rejection of its other, and yet Elizabeth cannot completely adhere to the demands of either. As she finds herself constantly defending

“absent relations from the sharp criticism of present ones” (ML 148) and fielding accusations of infidelity to her female duty in both the country and the city, Elizabeth begins to feel “as though she was caught in a great spider’s web; the delicate, almost invisible threads clung about her, impeding her movement, almost choking her” (ML 280). 60

The problem for Elizabeth is that she realizes neither of the options available to her is able to satisfy her craving for both. At first, she does believe that by the “rejection of various old elements in her life, and the careful fusing and mingling various new ones,” she could

“manufacture happiness.” But, with time, she “began to distrust the results of her experiment

[and] in her secret soul a wretched suspicion grew, ever stronger and stronger, that happiness can never be manufactured” (ML 252). Malet’s use of an industrial metaphor here is most certainly deliberate. Though there is a clear sense in the novel that Elizabeth’s urban life is a fairly successful work of art—her would-be lover, Wharton, for example, has at one point the

“haunting idea that in marrying Elizabeth he would be spoiling a great artistic effect” (ML

234)—it is one created out of the material of the present alone, and is, therefore, subject to all kinds of misreadings.

In the final scene of Elizabeth’s life in London, she is horrified when Edward Dadley, a former lover from her Claybrooke days, mistakes Wharton for her dead husband. As Wharton wryly notes, “could anything be much more disastrous . . . than to be taken for the dead husband of the woman you had more than half a mind to propose to?” (ML 300). And yet, Elizabeth’s response reflects her gradual comprehension of the fickle nature of the urban identity she has manufactured: “My husband? You don’t know what you have said. You don’t know what you have done. And yet, I ought to thank you for you have shown me what I really am” (ML 300).

In her zeal to create an appropriate identity for the urban community, she had forgotten to consider that the ways in which that identity might not align with her other identity, that of a woman of spiritual and moral depth.

The strange twist in Mrs. Lorimer is that it is debatable whether Elizabeth Lorimer ever does find out what she really is. Once she returns to Claybrooke, she rushes headlong into the 61 well-trodden role of moral and religious penitent and again seeks to erase important pieces of her experience from her identity. As a penitent, “she was possessed with the passionate longing for entire self-surrender that has made torture and death an actual joy for thousands. She was in love with a new and exquisite ideal which had presented itself to her; and she could neither pause nor rest till she had made the offering of herself complete” (ML 320). As she settles back into life in

Claybrooke, Elizabeth is at first supported by “the passionate feeling, born of love to her dead husband and bitter sorrow for her past willfulness,” but, as time passes, she “was tempted to think her faults of little importance, and her repentance exaggerated” (ML 324). Nevertheless, she clings to the role of moral and religious penitent and eventually dies after nursing the

Claybrooke poor in a fever epidemic.

Elizabeth’s actions make sense for Claybrooke society because they can be related to precedent. This fact is underscored by the fact that once Elizabeth returns to Claybrooke, her story is given from the perspective of the middle-class, middle-aged, unmarried, male narrator who had opened the novel but gradually fallen aside as the action developed. In the middle sections of the novel an omniscient third-person narration allows the reader to follow Elizabeth’s actions and thoughts with minimal commentary from a narrator, but the change in narrative style at the end of the novel produces an unashamedly biased explanation of Elizabeth’s behavior.

The reader no longer gets any insight into what Elizabeth herself thinks or feels as she experiences the difficulties that lead up to her death, but we are able to see how Claybrooke views what happens. The narrator notes that “it may seem slightly eccentric to describe the moral and spiritual experiences of a modern young lady . . . in terms which are usually reserved for the delineation of a medieval saint,” but “given a certain type of character, its mental history will be nearly the same in every age” (ML 325). In other words, Elizabeth Lorimer’s final 62 choice, though perhaps a little extreme even for Claybrooke standards, is understandable because it echoes a path already trodden and much revered in human history.

The novel’s conventional ending, though very satisfying for many of Malet’s contemporaries because of its moral and spiritual implications,23 is clearly anti-climactic after the dramatic scenes of Elizabeth’s awakening. And this sense of anti-climax is further accentuated by the change in narrative style. This means that the novel, which had been committed to a rather rigorous examination of human behavior, ends on a curiously sentimental note.

Elizabeth’s life story is, in a way, hijacked by the narrator who works very hard to convince the reader that her chosen lifestyle and death were meaningful. But, as we are told how Mr.

Mainwaring and Wharton wipe away tears as they think about “my dear little Lizzie! God rest her sweet soul” (ML342), we have an odd sense that this is not quite where we expected ourselves to end up.

And, if we look at the way the novel is structured, it is clear that Malet did not intend her audience to have the satisfying experience of an emotional catharsis at the resolution of

Elizabeth Lorimer’s story. What she wanted to emphasize instead was that Elizabeth’s death occurred under quite commonplace—certainly not romantic or exceptional—circumstances. Her self-imposed penance did not, for example, take place in a desperately poor village in India or while nursing soldiers in the Crimea. It took place in the English countryside where there was “a clay soil, a wet summer, a bad harvest, very ordinary, stolid, laboring men and women ill with a fever” combined with “a background of solid comfort, secure prosperity, calm respectability”

(ML 340). The relatively comfortable, rural, middle-class English normalcy which attends

Elizabeth’s death at the end of the novel seems particularly odd given the expectations of many 63 characters in the novel who have been watching and waiting for Elizabeth to do something exceptional.

Though there is no particular reason why Elizabeth should be unusual, why she should not turn into a middle-class matron of no particular note at the end of the novel, the majority of characters in the novel expect something extraordinary from her. Fanny Lorimer, Elizabeth’s frivolous, but shrewd socialite sister-in-law, says more than once that she expects Elizabeth to

“surprise us all very much some day—go into a convent, or do something else very magnificent and slightly unpleasant” (ML 150). And Frank Wharton, who usually prides himself on his unconventional thinking, also subscribes to the idea of Elizabeth’s exceptionalness and even thinks she would be “something of a fraud” if she did not do something unexpected (ML ). The intrusive narrator justifies the expectations everyone seems to have by classifying Elizabeth as a particular psychological type. Women like Elizabeth are, he notes, “almost invariably honest, loyal, and generous, but a little dangerous. You may live with one of them for years, fancying that you know all about her; and some fine day your poor, reasonable, slow-moving, masculine mind will be greatly distracted and confused by finding that she has taken an entirely new departure” (ML 12). Clearly, the social strictures Elizabeth encounters prove too rigid to provide the kind of play she would need to make sense of her experience.

That Malet has Elizabeth turn to conventional spirituality as an answer to her modern dilemma seems to indicate that at this point in her literary career Malet, like Elizabeth Lorimer, was not willing to throw in her lot with the versions of personal liberty being promoted by the

23 Janet Courtney, in particular, found this ending remarkable for the way it “so touched to finer issues.” She cites the last two paragraphs and makes the prophecy that “the girl who could write like that at two or three and twenty certainly deserved the serious recognition of contemporary criticism” (“Lucas Malet’s Novels” 534). 64

“New Woman” ideologues.24 And it is true that though Lucas Malet was a proponent of strong- minded, courageous intellectual practice, she was never a political radical of any kind. She never subscribed to the New Woman or any other feminist or political movement, she remained married to her husband until he died, and, she dealt respectfully with the ideas of her father’s generation throughout her life. And yet, the heavy-handedness of the narrator’s interpretation of events and the complicated, sometimes tortured meanderings of Malet’s characters as they struggle to make sense of their place in modern English society, make it seem questionable whether Malet meant this ending to be as simply bittersweet as it appears. Elizabeth Lorimer might have repudiated an urban version of modern womanhood, but she didn’t really adopt the life expected of her by Claybrooke society either. She remained something of an enigma for both groups, an anomaly—like Malet, herself. Thus, it does not seem that in this novel Malet was actually proposing adherence to traditional, patriarchal ways as the answer for modern women. What she was really doing was challenging those who wished to codify English women’s behavior and thought according to any one, generalized standard—however modern.

Deadham Hard, a Romance (1919)

Malet’s ambivalence about modern woman and her ability to develop fully, courageously, and without undue hindrance in middle-class English society is an undercurrent in much of her later writing. But where in Mrs. Lorimer Malet seemed unsure whether modern life could foster the kind of development she imagined women were capable of, by the time she wrote DeadhamHard, a Romance , she had clearly found an answer to her dilemma. Deadham

24 It is important to note here that the New Woman was not christened as such until 1894 when Malet’s contemporary, “Ouida, ”coined the politically charged label to describe socially conscious and politically motivated feminist writing. In her essay, “The Christening of the New Woman: May 1894,” Ellen Jordan claims that Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an Africa Farm (1883) was “the first indication that a new breed of feminist was in the 65

Hard is both a reworking of the material in Malet’s previous novel, Damaris (1916) and also a continuation of that novel’s story. It follows the psycho-social development of Damaris Verity, the daughter of a British colonial army officer famed for his exploits in India and Afghanistan, and takes up the action once Damaris and her father return from India to his family home,

Deadham Hard. Where in Mrs. Lorimer, the female protagonist’s character and story remain as the novel’s title proposes, “a sketch in black and white,” in Deadham Hard, Malet’s heroine is far more substantial. Because of her experience in India, Damaris Verity is able to function well in the world of language and symbol—the symbolic—and remain creatively attuned to those experiences which are felt, but remain inexpressible in language—the semiotic. Thus, with the example of Damaris, Malet makes the rather tough assertion that it is only through an intimate experience with cultures other than English culture that English people—and middle-class

English women, in particular—can develop a real sensitivity to the complexity of human experience and learn to live life to its fullest.

There are, of course, three decades of Malet’s own experience between Mrs. Lorimer and

Deadham Hard, including her great success with Sir Richard Calmady. But the personal experience which gives Deadham Hard its specific contours was Malet’s visit to India from

1894-1895. Though there is little record of this visit in Malet’s non-fictional writings, traces of it can be found in most of the novels that followed.25 Interestingly, after her journey Malet did not immediately turn to the colonial theater when choosing settings for her novels, and it was not until Damaris that she actually placed the greater part of a story’s action in a non-European place. Damaris is unusual in that it takes place in India and has as its protagonist a five-year-old

process of being born” (19). Nevertheless, Malet’s language in Mrs. Lorimer seems to indicate that the roots of the movement were already well under way as she drafted this 1882 novel. 25 See, for example, Malet’s concern with the porous nature of the imagined divide between the natural and supernatural in The Carissima, The Gateless Barrier, and Adrian Savage. 66 girl, but it is in Deadham Hard, the novel in which colonial English experience is returned to

English soil, that Malet works out her ideal of English womanhood most fully.

During the years just prior to World War I, Malet appears to have been particularly critical of the culture of the center. In a 1904 interview, she expressed her great disappointment with middle-class English culture which, because of its mania for control and restraint, inhibited an apprehension of “life as a whole” (Archer 220). She considered the English middle class

“impregnably entrenched in prejudice, in self-complacent mediocrity” and felt that they “lived and died impressively ignorant of every point of view except their own” (Damaris 10). Malet placed the blame for this lack squarely on the shoulders of England’s official spiritual leader, the

Church of England, which she felt was “so stupidly afraid of the lessons of life as a whole, and so resolute never to learn them” that it depended completely on “rationalism . . ., the real enemy”

(Archer 220) to make sense of all kinds of human experiences. In Malet’s opinion, middle-class

English rationalism sought to deny the reality of experiences which cannot be verified by science and language, and so denied the existence of all that gives mystery and fullness to life. It ignored

“the inherent instability of all which the eye looks on or the heart desires” and produces people

“true to type as some carefully specialized breed of sheep or poultry” (Damaris 9-10). Deadham

Hard is a meditation on the mechanisms middle-class English culture used to control and, where possible, eradicate experiences registered in the semiotic. But as the novel shows, such mechanisms usually prove wholly inadequate to the task, especially where people like Damaris

Verity and her father are concerned.

The central place of the novel, the house Deadham Hard, is the site where the struggle between English rationalism and the desire to live “life as a whole” is played out. Malet places the house in a remote area of the south-western English coast and once again turns to the village 67 and environs of Clovelly for her inspiration. Deadham Hard lies at a distance from the village of

Deadham, close to a marshy delta created by the confluence of two tidal rivers. These rivers are constantly changing the physical landscape they have helped form, with the result that the inhabitants of the area regularly have to find new paths to cross the area, and strangers have to be rescued when caught off guard by the shifting paths of the tides. Its proximity to the water and distance from other habitation means that the Hard is a house with a checkered past. At one time it was both “a convenient receiving house for smuggled goods” and “a convenient rendezvous for the more lawless characters of the neighbourhood—a back-of-beyond and No Man’s Land where the devil could, with impunity, have things very much his own way” (DH 4).

It was brought into the Verity family by Damaris’s great-great-uncle, a “cosmopolitan savant and social reformer” who had gone to fight for “the regeneration of mankind” in France during the Revolution. His ardor had been later squelched by the possibility that “his own head—so full of ingenious thought and lively curiosity” was in danger of “being sent flying to join those of Brissot and Verginaud, of wayward explosive Camille and sweet Lucile

Desmoulins, in that same unspeakable basket” (DH 5). And his acquisition of Deadham Hard was motivated by the simple fact its “vacant whitewashed countenance and long-eared chimney- stacks had welcomed him, if roughly and grudgingly, to England and to peace” (DH 10). After the shock, horror, and wholesale destruction of the Terror, Mr. Verity wished to “devote all the energy he possessed to construction, . . . to a building up, as a personal protest against much lately witnessed wanton and chaotic pulling down” (DH 10). And so, he renovated the house, sealing up the vaults and cellars so that “neither harborage of contraband, cruel laughter of man, or yell of tortured beast should again defile the underworld” of the house (DH 11). Verity reconstructs Deadham Hard into a haven of enlightened pursuits, the home for his “fine library, 68 his famous herbarium, his cabinets of crystal, of coins, of shells” (DH 10). But in his zeal for the creation of a haven of peace and order, Verity leaves no place for the unpredictability of nature and the seamy underbelly of human existence.

Malet believed in the genius locii, the spirits of particular places which were created over eons by the traces of lives that have been lived and the actions that had occurred there.26 These traces were ineradicable and prone to erupting into people’s lives at the most unexpected moments because it was “impossible that spirit once evoked can ever wholly die” (Damaris 7).

In Freudian terms, Malet is talking about the return of the repressed, and in Kristeva’s the revolt of that which had been abjected. But where these psychoanalytic theorists would propose that such a situation was universally applicable, Malet makes it very clear that certain people— namely satisfied members of the English middle-class—had lost their sensitivity to these powerful forces. Though they might have a vague sense of discomfort about Deadham Hard, such people are no longer capable of tapping into the creative/destructive essence of the place, its life-giving jouissance.

The one character who is able to appreciate the genius locus of Deadham Hard is

Damaris, whose difference from middle-class English people makes her so appealing and something of a puzzle—both to the novel’s omniscient narrator and also to the characters that surround her. As in Mrs. Lorimer, one of the dilemmas Malet saw for modern English women was that English society was unable to provide an arena for the expression of women’s complex natures. But where for Elizabeth Lorimer that meant repudiation of her desires and eventual annihilation, for Damaris Verity the problem is not so personally destructive. Elizabeth

Lorimer’s struggle for identity took place within English culture in England, but Damaris was born and brought up in India, a place which stimulated “her apprehension of things unseen, 69 begetting in her precocious perception alike of the glory and alarm of living” (Damaris 9). She does not question the reality of these experiences even though her sense of them “was inarticulate, an affair not of thought, but of vague and transient emotion” (Damaris 9), and when she returns to live in England, she does not lose her sensitivity to them. The result is that the abjected and renegade undercurrents of English life, the experiences which English middle-class culture tries to control and overcome, are shown to be very much alive to Damaris whose sensibilities were formed outside the constraints of such Englishness.

The result for Damaris Verity is that Deadham Hard is not the peaceful haven her great- great uncle imagined he was creating. Instead, it is a place continually unsettled by what is brought in by the unpredictable tides at its feet and haunted by the terrors and dramas of past and present experience. Perhaps the most striking example of this sensory underworld is the ghostly mob of smugglers’ ponies which she hears move from the coast up into the lower rooms of the house whenever some great change in her life is about to occur. These ponies are invisible, but as she listens, she can hear them “hustling and trampling one another as they shied away from the whip.—There were laggards too—one stumbled, rolled over in the sand, got up on its feet after a nasty struggle, and tottered onward dead lame. Another fell in its tracks and lay there foundered, rattling in the throat” (DH 32). Whenever she hears them, Damaris knows that something terrible is about to happen, but she also knows from experience that the change can either bring great sorrow, great joy, or, more probably, a mixture of both. Thus, Deadham Hard, which is “steeped in tradition, thick with past happenings, past passions” can be something of a burden for Damaris, and there are times when she simply has to get away from the place and ride up into the surrounding moorlands where the soil is “as yet untamed and unfertilized by the labor of man” (DH 98).

26 She explains this idea most fully in the first chapter of Damaris. 70

What precipitates Damaris’s move to the world of Deadham Hard is her father’s mistaken assumption that English place is a haven of peace and order when compared with the potentially destructive sensual chaos which was thought characteristic of India. But what Charles Verity is really running from is sex. After a complex series of failed liaisons which all but destroy his career as an officer in India, he swears off any kind of entanglement with women, goes to war in

Afghanistan, and sends Damaris to what he believes will be the safety of orderly, English place.

Charles Verity is the kind of English man Malet felt represented the nation at its best. In an interview with the American writer Francis Whiting Halsey, Malet noted that

as far as Englishmen are concerned, it is not in England that you must study them

[because there] they are more of less all alike . . .. To really know your

Englishman, you must study him in India or South Africa, away from civilization,

face to face with nature and the problems of primitive life. Then it is that the

magnificent qualities of pluck and endurance and courage come out that have

made England what she is. (69-70)

And this is most certainly true for Charles Verity, who lacked the political finesse needed to succeed in England, itself, but was ruthlessly brilliant as Commissioner Sahib of the kingdom of

Sultan-i-bagh at Bhutpur.

If Charles Verity’s motivation for bringing Damaris back to Deadham Hard was to remove her and himself from the potential danger of his sexual passions, it clearly is a very strange move. This is because the Hard was the scene of his first passionate sexual encounter with a woman, Lesbia Faircloth, a proud, unsentimental businesswoman who runs a tavern of ill repute in the Deadham marshes. This liaison occurred just before Verity’s appointment to India and produced an illegitimate son who is so like his father that even Damaris mistakes him for her 71 father. Thus, instead of protecting Damaris from the real results of sexual passion, Charles

Verity actually forces her into the awkward position of having to acknowledge his human fraility. When faced with the fact of her brother’s existence, Damaris must decide whether or not she is prepared to modify her perception of her father from god-like to that of god-like and a man torn by sexual passion. Because she was five years old when her father had vowed to “cast out the lust of flesh, the lust of the eyes, from this day forward to the end” (Damaris 400), Damaris had only vague memories of this side of her father’s identity, and so her acceptance of him as more than just an icon of perfection is not immediate or without struggle.

But ultimately for Damaris the question becomes, will she deny the existence of this living result of her father’s sexual passion? Will she take on the moral shame her middle-class

English acquaintances expect her to feel about her father, her brother, and herself? Or will she value her half-brother for who he is? Because of her ability to see and understand life on multiple levels, Damaris soon understands that the apparent order of middle-class English morality is as illusory as its imagined universal applicability. The result is that after a great deal of soul-searching, Damaris decides to adopt her brother’s decidedly un-middle-class attitude about the affair. Instead of being ashamed of his illegitimate birth, Darcy Faircloth sees his life as the natural result of a passionate, wonderful, sexual encounter between infinitely fallible human beings. As he says, “they were young, and—mayn’t we allow—they were beautiful.

That’s often a good deal to do with these accidents. They met and, God help them, they loved”

(DH 123). When Damaris asks if he regrets his parents’ actions, Faircloth reasons that perhaps they were wrong, but “as it gave me life and as I love life I’m hardly the person to deliver an unbiased opinion on the subject” (DH 123). By answering her thus, Faircloth asks Damaris to use the best of her reason and her compassion to understand him, his mother, and their father and 72 to disavow the judgmental, moral outrage of the middle-class community of Deadham. And this is what Damaris, a woman not bound by the myopic vision of her class or nationality, can do.

Of course, Damaris is aware of the social danger to herself, her father, and her brother that her acceptance of Faircloth will produce. So, ever resourceful and mindful of the comparative narrowness of England’s possibilities, Damaris persuades her father to journey on the Continent. But, just as Charles Verity mistakenly sought to evade the pull of sex and passion by returning to England, Damaris soon finds herself in a similar position. Once she leaves

England, she is haunted by the realization that she, too, is a sexual creature though instead of being hounded by these sensations, she uses her reason to give them a name and place in her identity. The problem is she recognizes, that “to run—yes, run and hide from further knowledge, further experience and revelation” was useless because “fact remains fact, and if she refused to accept it . . . she merely postponed the event” (DH 180). As she comes to terms with the fact of her sexuality, Damaris realizes that it grants her a certain power to influence the lives of her fellow men, and she begins to search for a way to bring her desire for a meaningful life and her sexuality into a creative balance.

When asked why she began to write, Lucas Malet usually deflected the seriousness of the question by answering in either overly pragmatic terms—because “she was dreadfully dull and wanted a little money” (Dickens 524)—or overly romantic ones—“I suppose the desire to write was in my blood” (Dolman 147). But in Deadam Hard, Malet relates Damaris’s budding awareness of her power as a woman—and of power in general—to a desire to write. One of the ways Damaris and her father’s friend, Colonel Cartaret, scheme to keep her father occupied while on the Continent is by encouraging him to write his memoirs of India. And, as Damaris assists her father, she comes to realize that writing for public consumption is an act which allows 73 her to give voice to semiotic and symbolic experience simultaneously. Because writing is “an art in process of being actively realized in living, constructive effort,” she sees it as akin to the creative act of giving birth to a child. It is one of “the rarest delights granted to mortal man” because it is an art which can give “the whole world . . . a new significance and splendour” and its creator a “right to dominion and freedom” (DH 214-215). Of course, one cannot simply equate the words of a fictional character with the beliefs of her creator, but there is still a very real sense in Damaris Verity’s statement that Malet understood writing as a way for women to influence human lives and express experiences which are difficult to articulate. Though Damaris does not actually explore this option in the novel, it is very clear that she does entertain the question, “mightn’t she aspire to do it too, some day? Mightn’t granted patience and application, the writing of books prove to be her business, her vocation?” (DH 215).

But, by the end of the novel, the question whether Damaris will become an author or not is almost completely subsumed by the psychological and personal dangers she faces once her father dies. It is one of the ironies of the novel that as soon as she is aware of the nature of sexuality and its relation to power in patriarchal society, Damaris is absolutely besieged by characters who desire to have her possessed sexually and legally. Her father’s ex-lover,

Henrietta Periera, several of Henrietta’s impoverished male protégés, and her father’s friend,

Colonel Cartaret, all want to enmesh Damaris in some kind of marriage plan. And it is, in some ways, out of fear of this sex/power-related onslaught that Damaris flees to the comparative safety of marriage with Colonel Cartaret.

Colonel Cartaret is middle-aged, has known Damaris since she was a child in India, and is intimately connected with her father in her fantasy. He has been a shadowy player throughout her life, appearing unexpectedly at certain crucial moments and being conspicuously absent at 74 others. But it is worth noting that his presence or absence has always been important to

Damaris’s ability to function in English society. Without Cartaret’s influence, Damaris would never have been at Deadham Hard in the first place, and she would never have managed to stave off any of Henrietta Pierera’s plots to marry her to any one of her protégés.27 Damaris affirms the profound importance of Cartaret’s influence to her life when she says that “Nobody can ever take your place or be to me what you’ve been. I shall always love to think of your goodness to— to him—my father—and to me—always—all my life” (DH 502). And, it is telling that once

Damaris decides to engage herself to Cartaret, she starts to call him by the name she used for her father in times of emotional duress—“Colonel Sahib.” Such a title solidifies her deeply-rooted connection to her father, to her colonial heritage, and to the presence of those elements in her present life.

Thus, at the end of the novel Malet pulls together its many, various threads by creating the union of these two oddly-matched colonial English people, a union which brings together a series of elements normally thought of as oppositional: experience of India and England, age and youth, knowledge and inexperience, reason and intuition, the unruly, inexpressible semiotic and the ordering ability of the symbolic. Perhaps because of its resolution of the divide between such oppositional elements, this union promises to satisfy both characters’ most intimate desires. In her recent study, Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman, Catherine

Robson notes that one of the pervasive fantasies of male development in the Victorian era was that “men become masculine only after an initial feminine stage,” and that “in this light, little girls represent not just the true essence of childhood, but an adult male’s best opportunity of reconnecting with his own lost self” (3). For Cartaret, marriage with Damaris means that he

27 It was Cartaret’s influence on Charles Verity which forestalled his self destruction after Henrietta Pierera’s sudden disappearance from his life, and it was to Cartaret’s opinion that Damaris looked as she sought to find her place as a 75 possesses the child-woman he thought would never be his, but who he has loved “as a man only loves once, and as most men never love at all” (DH 503). Cartaret had earned himself a name as a ladies man in India, so in the logic of the novel, his preference for Damaris at this later stage of his life rehabilitates him. For her part, Damaris is quite taken by the idea that she will have

Cartaret “quite for my own” (DH 503), the implication being that, unlike the father who she was forced to share with other women, Cartaret will be under her dominion alone. Whether or not the marriage will be a success is not implied, but it is certainly a logical solution to the immediate problems both characters face and the satisfaction of some of their profoundly important fantasies.

The Private Life of Mr. Justice Syme.

If the bond between Damaris Verity and Colonel Cartaret strikes one as strange and yet logical, given the particular psychological make-up of both characters, the same cannot be said of the relationship between the two principal characters in The Private Life of Mr. Justice Syme,

Robert Syme and Barbara Heritage Though the marriage was contracted for much the same reason as that of Damaris and Cartaret—safety from forces outside their control and the satisfaction of certain fantasies—it continually teeters on the verge of destruction. One source of this instability is each character’s desire to gain and/or retain hold of the other, so that, ironically, it is their ardent desire for mutuality and certainty which creates dissent and uncertainty in their relationships. Where in Mrs. Lorimer and Deadham Hard, there is still a sense that men and women have some control over who they choose to love and, therefore, their ultimate destiny, in

The Private Life of Mr. Justice Syme, the characters are tormented by their inability to reconcile the force of their passions with the desires and needs of their partners. Further complicating their

young woman in English society. See Damaris pp. 395-400 and Deadham Hard pp. 271-309. 76 actions are the demands of English law which is represented as inhumanly impassive to human desire and, therefore, antithetical to the resolution of emotional difficulties.

Justice Syme was Malet’s last novel. Published in 1932, it was the novel she was working on when she was visited by Dorothy Gilman in 1925. It was also the sequel to her other post-war publication, The Dogs of Want; a Modern Comedy of Errors (1924), and it was the one novel Malet knew she was destined never to complete. But, unlike her father, Malet did not leave the completion and further administration of her creative work to serendipity. For decades she had carefully fostered the abilities of her protégé, Gabrielle Vallings, in order to assure the continuity of her creative legacy, and Vallings felt that she understood enough of Malet’s purpose for the characters of the novel to finish it. That Vallings was no Malet becomes abundantly clear as one reads through this final, joint venture; but, nevertheless, there is enough of Malet’s “familiar . . . method of construction” (Vallings 9) for us to see that her exploration of the relation of Englishness to Britain’s colonial identities was far from exhausted

In many ways, the novel returns to the problem Malet first began to explore in Mrs.

Lorimer: what roles can modern, English women play in middle-class English culture? But in this novel Malet focuses on the thorny issue of women’s relationship to one of the most central institutions of English life, English law. Malet was in her seventies as she worked on Justice

Syme, and from the tone of the novel, it is clear that she was critical of the rather hedonistic, anti-establishment approach to life which characterized much of the post-war years in England.

Through Barbara Syme, Malet notes that the popular approach to life “in the post-war world,

[was that] one should take life headlong, without concern for others, or plan for oneself, sprawl or caper through it, obeying no implusion save that of passing appetite” (JS 19). Malet’s problem with such an attitude, as always, was that any absolute expectation can become a kind of 77 bondage. Thus, once again, Malet’s novel is concerned with the necessity of balance in human lives. How, the novel asks, does modern woman find a way to negotiate the gulf between English culture’s demand that, on the one hand, she accept as absolute the word of law, verifiable evidence, and the dismissal of emotion from legal judgment, and, on the other hand, live life as dictated by popular sentiment—according to the satisfaction of her desires?

In order to answer this question, Malet once again turns to the story of a woman who marries young, is soon widowed, and must find her own way to negotiate her conflicting desires for the order of the symbolic and the unruly chaos of the semiotic. Just as we met Elizabeth

Lorimer after the fact of her emotional struggle over the death of her ineffective but vaguely- loved husband, in Justice Syme we meet Barbara Heritage after the fact of her first husband’s death. But where Elizabeth Lorimer’s personal wealth meant that she could remain single and live comfortably, Barbara Heritage’s poverty forces her to make the practical and certainly unromantic decision to marry Mr. Justice Syme for the simple reason that he desires her and commands both wealth and power in English society. Barbara’s goal in marrying Syme is to outwit the Dogs of Want, the poverty and powerlessness which attended her first marriage and widowhood, and she feels certain that Syme is fully capable of keeping such want at bay. Early in the novel she notes, “as for the future, couldn’t she trust Sir Robert Syme—her husband, and surely sufficient dominating and trustworthy hostage with Fate, to take care of it for her?” (JS

18). Even so, such a logical and even mercenary motive for marriage is soon revealed to be problematic because it is not conducive of the kind of trust and respect for the individual needed for a marriage to flourish.

During her previous marriage, Barbara’s daily life had been wholly taken up with the difficulties inherent to that dire combination: poverty and illness. But now, as she sits in her 78 beautiful and expensively-decorated rooms, she feels a want of a different kind. Barbara

Heritage is special, the narrator tells us, because by nature she is “mistress of, and complete in herself.” She was “neither derivative not parasitic—as too many women of her generation and class—and because of that very completeness had no need to adhere, to pull and suck, but could afford to give” (JS 19). Like both Damaris Verity and Elizabeth Lorimer, she is one of the women Julia Kristeva would classify as “strange, disillusioned, and yet lively and reliable.” It is

Barbara’s air of completeness which makes her attractive to practically every man in the novel, and it is that same quality which provoked Justice Syme to manipulate the lives of several different people in order to possess her. And yet, once Barbara settles into life as Lady Syme, this sense of wholeness starts to fade. With time and leisure to turn “to contemplation and retrospect, regarding the origin of her” present situation (JS 21), she begins to question the validity of every assumption which anchors her marriage, especially those relating to her husband.

Robert Syme epitomizes the strength, power, and brilliance of English law, but also its inherent weaknesses where human beings are concerned. He is the most senior judge in

London’s Criminal Courts which “deal not with learned and recondite elaborations of jurisprudence, but with life in the raw, scenes of human drama, fundamental in their appeal, their terror, and their pathos” (JS 56). Until his marriage to Barbara, he had been able to judge even the most horrendous crimes of passion with an impartiality and personal distance which earned him the reputation of being like Rhadamanthus, the Ancient Greek demi-god who on account of his inflexible integrity was made one of the judges of the dead in the underworld

(“Rhadamanthus”). But his ability to ignore peripheral arguments in order to focus on the central problem, though of paramount importance in the law courts, is actually the source of uncertainty 79 in his marriage with Barbara. Syme is a man who has believed himself impervious to corruption by emotion; but, when he encounters the overwhelming force of his desire for Barbara, he is completely unnerved. Unable to balance both emotion and intellect, he is ruthless in the pursuit of what he believes will satisfy his desire—Barbara—and moves like a steamroller through the lives of those who stand in the way of his possession of her. His inability to balance emotion and intellect also means that the very sight or thought of Barbara destroys his ability to act with the impartiality expected of him, and so, he cannot allow Barbara to even be an observer in his professional life at the courts.

For her part, Barbara becomes increasingly disillusioned with her husband’s inability to include her in his professional life, even when, in a moment of great candidness, he clearly articulates why: “I am not sufficiently accustomed to you—and trust I never shall be—to take your neighbourhood for granted, to be in the same place with you without being fully conscious of the fact” (JS 57). Barbara does not accept this argument because she cannot forget that in the construction of their relationship he has acted with such massive disregard for the desires and humanity of others. Where in the early days of their relationship Syme’s desire for Barbara acted as a panacea for past hurts and difficulties, once the relationship settles into a regular pattern, his force of character becomes oppressive. Barbara feels as though his presence

“loomed up behind and above her, in the fog-vitiated morning light, seeming to envelope and bear down on her, as a brooding storm-cloud might” (JS 58). And, instead of the peace and safety Barbara expected to enjoy, she begins to fear for “the fullness of her individuality, the freedom of her soul” because they were “at his mercy, to destroy, or spare, as he pleased” (JS

58). If all power in the relationship rests in Syme’s hands, then Barbara worries that her 80

“original, her essential self” will eventually be overwhelmed by his desires, his wishes, and his judgments (JS 58).

In order to give their personal difficulties a name, Barbara turns to the concept of Syme as “the Oriental” and of herself as the “light of his harem” (JS 59). Though she realizes that there may be good reason for his reticence towards her participation in his public duties, she asks herself whether she is willing to “be kept behind the curtain, forbidden participation (even as a spectator) in the public labours of her lord and master, her role limited to the soothing of his mind and satisfaction of his body when the labours were, for the time being, ended, and he at liberty to amuse himself” (JS 59). This concept of “the Oriental” is, of course, indicative of the style of thought Edward Said identifies as “Orientalism,” the “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (3). As Said notes, Orientalism is also a way of thinking which expresses “a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases, to control, manipulate, even incorporate, what is a manifestly different world” (Said 12). Malet’s use of the term to describe Syme, who is the embodiment of English law, underscores the difficulties modern women face in a modern world. No matter what women achieve, she implies, if ultimate power over one’s life rests in the hands of men alone, there can be little meaningful change in the ways women function within the social system.28

Despite the ancient rituals that Syme observes in his court of law, he is, after all, a modern man. He is a “modern judge of this twentieth century, with its modern perplexities and perversions, its infinite complexity of thought and purpose. Judge too of its bewildered, passion driven quick, rather than of any helpless, fabled, Classic dead” (JS 61). Malet attributes Syme’s ability to bridge the demands of the law and the force of desire to his modernity and shows how

28 Malet’s position here is not unlike the contemporary feminist thinker Catherine Mackinnon addresses this issue in Towards a Feminist Theory of the State. 81 this ability eventually saves Symes’s marriage and life. When he realizes that Barbara is being distanced by his “Oriental” expectations, he gives her the choice to remain as his wife or to leave. Instead of enforcing his legal rights, he shows that he is prepared to lose her rather than have her remain against her will. As Malet shows, it is only when the Syme and Barbara recognize their need for each other that they can stop the cycle of resentment and dissatisfaction which is the natural result of being bound to one another in a relationship of domination and dependency.

As the plot of Justice Syme unfolds, it becomes increasingly evident that the text, though perhaps Malet’s in spirit and intent, is gradually being executed by a writer of a different caliber. Perhaps the most striking difference between the earlier sections—which are clearly in

Malet’s hand—and the latter—which are clearly Gabrielle Vallings’—is that the unique character of physical places no longer help clarify psychological dimensions of the action. In the earlier sections, the different places in London where action occurs are given personality and contours which underscore the complexities of people’s relationships; but, in the latter sections, place is irrelevant to the action. So, for example, when Barbara’s would-be-lover, Denison

Fisher, is pondering the nature of his relationship to his wife, Syme’s daughter, Marie-Louise, he does so in a specific, physical place:

The thunder and rush of the traffic in the Strand passed to the right and left of

him, as he stood on the island which bears St. Clement Danes. In the west a vivid

yellow, betokening storm, glowed, surmounted by plumed clouds of vapour, and

lending a fantastic element to Australia House and its sister buildings, giving

them an effect of monster and towering palaces, rather than the well-dressed 82

children of the Colonies and Dependencies, for whose commerce and pastoral

industries they stand monument. (JS 174)

The scene highlights the grotesque and dangerous nature of colonial relationships which have outworn their original uses, and it illustrates Fisher’s sense that his marriage, contracted under a certain set of colonialist assumptions, has become something of a grotesque as well. In contrast, later in the novel characters move around London and fly from France to England, but Vallings does not endow those places with any kind of character or particular function. They are simply places—infinitely interchangeable and completely irrelevant to the action.

By the end of Justice Syme, we are aware that we are no longer engaging with the deeply psychological and emphatically human-centered writing of Lucas Malet. As Vallings says,

“Lucas Malet’s characters were alive, and somewhat defiant, before I touched the book”

(Vallings 10), but it is impossible to say whether the novel ends as Malet intended. That Barbara

Syme realizes she has fallen in love with Syme at the end of the novel seems odds considering the intricate arguments she had developed earlier to support her idea that marriage with Syme was impossible. It also seems odd that Barbara and Syme do not really develop an understanding of each other’s differences, and yet, they end up in each other’s arms as though no such differences had ever existed. And oddest of all is the convenient death of Syme’s daughter,

Marie-Louise, in a train crash in France just as she is about to reveal secrets which were better kept quiet. But we must take the novel as we have it—with Malet’s hand gradually disappearing and Vallings’ taking the reins. Nevertheless, the intriguing question remains: what would Malet have done to resolve her protagonists’ differences if she had lived? My own sense is that

Malet’s resolution would have involved a little more courage and a little less convenience than the one Vallings offers. 83

Courage! Courage! Courage!

When we look at the criticism, interviews, and other writings about Lucas Malet, the idea which appears most frequently is that her novels do not fit very well in any of the categories used to give English literature a clear, historical structure. Her contemporary, Dorothy Gilman, saw this as evidence of Malet’s excellence as a modern writer and claimed that “Lucas Malet’s work may never be superficially assigned to any school of modern fiction. Only the most unimaginative of critics with an academic measuring rod, with the soul of a librarian, rather than the sensibility of an artist, would give her work a definite place in any arbitrary classification”

(6). And her more recent critic, Talia Schaffer, claims that Malet’s novels actually indicate “the poverty of our usual groupings of turn-of-the-century novels” because they are “not solely aesthetic or naturalist or psychological; they are not utopian or socialist; they are not New

Woman novels; they contain something of all these genres in a compromise formulation” (241).

In other words, Malet’s novels stand outside the paradigms most twentieth-century critics have used to write English literary histories—both of the feminist and non-feminist sort—and though this is certainly noteworthy, it has not really been to her advantage. Sadly, the works of this author, whose abilities were so well regarded by her contemporaries and who was so passionately concerned with the issue of women’s individuation in English society, are largely ignored today.

And yet, they have a great deal to say about the experience of life “in the center” during the Imperial period and may actually help us revise our notions of what that experience actually was—and was not. Malet’s Mrs. Lorimer, a Sketch in Black and White sets up a central problem that reappears in both Deadham Hard, a Romance and The Private Life of Mr. Justice Syme.

How does an English woman negotiate the demands made on her by modern life and learn to live 84

“life to its fullest?” The comparison of these three novels shows that Malet had different answers to this question at different moments in her life. In Mrs. Lorimer, her answer is to question whether the options promoted by modern English culture of the 1870s and 1880s offered anything better than those encompassed by tradition. In Deadham Hard, her answer is more radical: women simply have to get out of England and tread softly in middle-class English society in order to access their God-given abilities. And in Justice Syme, her answer is quixotic: if English women follow and trust in the wholeness of their natures, they are capable of changing the world around them.

But in all three of these novels it is very clear that Malet did not believe that England herself was the haven of peace and harmony middle-class English culture would have liked to imagine. She is a place with a complex, tangible history; that history has inundated the soil; and, whether her inhabitants like it or not, it affects their modern lives in crucial ways. Malet’s friend, Violet Hunt, wrote that Malet’s motto was “Courage! Courage! Courage!” and clearly,

Malet’s protagonists find that it takes courage to live as women in English society and not lose sight of what makes them unique. How successful they are depends on their ability to creatively negotiate the competitive pull of experiences they can express in language and experiences which are tangible but unspeakable because they are registered in the semiotic. Like, Damaris

Verity English women must be able to say, “it is the push of life itself, essential, fundamental— the push of spirit yearning to be clothed upon with flesh, made visible and given its chance to enter the earthly arena, to play an individual part in the beautiful, terrible, earthly scene” (DH

492). They must embrace the beauty and terror that make life worth living. 85

Chapter 3.

Rollicking in Ernest : “Somerville and Ross.”

The idea that the British Empire functioned in much the same way as a family was, as noted earlier, fostered for various purposes throughout the period, 1880-1940, and this development was actually quite logical given English assumptions about the way human society worked. As David Canadine has noted, the English

generally conceived of themselves as belonging to an unequal society

characterized by a seamless web of layered gradations, which were hallowed by

time and precedent, which were sanctioned by tradition and religion, and which

extended in a great chain of being from the monarch at the top to the humblest

subject at the bottom. (4)

It was this social order—based primarily on social status and, after the Enlightenment, often modified by race—which Britons projected onto their colonial possessions and the societies they contained. This vision of Empire as a family in which Mother/Father England ruled and fostered the development of her/his colonial children while the colonial children vied for the parents’ attention from their various niches is one that helped colonial participants make sense of their experience on many different levels. And this was particularly true of what can be considered the firstborn colony of the British Empire—Ireland.

English or Anglo-Saxon involvement in Ireland can be traced at least as far back as the transformation of Irish society begun by St. Patrick in the 5th century AD, but England’s first venture into “genuine colonialism” was the development of the first Munster Plantation in the

1560s on lands seized from Gerald Fitzgerald, the Earl of Desmond (McConville 24). What 86 made this endeavor so different was its methodology. It was the first time English lawmakers made an organized and concerted effort to establish a settlement of English people on lands confiscated from “native” owners. The settlement was structured, governed, and administrated according to English models, and though there was a domestic government in Ireland, it was ultimately responsible to the English Parliament in Westminster. The original Munster plantation was also the first time thought was given to possible problems that would face

“settlers of English origin in a sequestered territory of rich potential value where the original inhabitants could be assumed to be hostile” (McConville 25). Ireland became “a laboratory in which to conduct experiments” (Kiberd 1), a place where English administrators could work out the kinks of colonial governance. Though the first Munster plantation was eventually destroyed by warfare, the core elements of this form of colonizing and the social, racial, and religious relationships it set in motion were to have an enormous influence on life in Ireland, Britain and other colonial places for centuries.29

The Anglo-Irish.

Central to England’s eventual success in Ireland were the settlers who managed to outlast the difficulties of the Irish situation and whose descendents eventually became known as the

Anglo-Irish. Though the name seems to imply a specific racial identity, the Anglo-Irish families were not always descendents of English people or even people who spoke English.30 Instead, they were what Michael McConville has called “an unusual colonial caste” (1). From the late

29 The Irish critic Declan Kiberd goes so far as to claim that for centuries “Ireland was pressed into service as a foil to set off English virtues, . . . and as a fantasy-land in which to meet fairies and monsters.” In turn, the Irish tended to see England as a “fairyland” where the aristocracy seemed “as exotic as the caliphs of Baghdad” (1-2). Though Kiberd acknowledges a certain reciprocity between the neighboring countries, his assessment emphasizes the disparities rather than the mutualities of the relationship. He acknowledges that Ireland had a special status in the imperial family, like that of a firstborn, but implies that it played its role relatively unwillingly. 87 seventeenth and into the nineteenth century, the Anglo-Irish were the ascendant minority in

Ireland. In general, they were Protestants who relied on the implementation of English-style government and the British military to support their way of life (Moynahan 4). And despite the fact that they lived “apart, worshipped apart, and expected to go on legislating [their] own rights and freedoms apart from the rest of the Irish people into the indefinite future” (Moynahan 4), the

Anglo-Irish flourished economically, politically, and culturally for almost two hundred years.

Their demise paralleled and was indeed precipitated by Irish nationalist agitation for political and social revolution during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And the eventual abandonment of the Anglo-Irish to their fate by the British government was yet another first— albeit a dubious one—in that it was “the first of many ‘betrayals’ of traditional elites [by the government in Westminster] that litter the history of the end of empire” (Cannadine 154).

As their political and economic powers were being eroded, the Anglo-Irish continued to produce a culture and, in particular, a literature which documents their various responses to the complex historical events occurring in Ireland at the turn of the century. But though most critics seem to agree that the period saw a flowering of writing by Anglo-Irish authors, there has been significantly less agreement about whose writing counts as an expression of Irish life during the turbulent years of nationalist struggle.31 In her 1990 study, Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted

Tradition, Ann Owens Weekes notes that until very recently critics tended to favor writing which underscored the virility of Irish nationalist discourse. Weekes cites as an example Frank

O’Connor’s 1963 argument that “men have written the literature of the Irish renaissance . . .

30 Michael McConville notes that “a fair proportion of the dominant caste were ethnically of Norman, Gaelic Irish, French Huguenot and Dutch origin while some of the “native” Irish were of almost undiluted English stock” (v). 31 Ann Owens Weekes makes the designations “Gaelic-Irish” and “Anglo-Irish” to distinguish between the two traditions of Irish culture. As she notes, “Irish was the common name both groups applied to themselves until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then those attempting to free Ireland from political subordination to England—predominantly the descendants of the Celts—coined the Anglo prefix in an effort to valorize their own Irishness” (11). 88 because politics (which usually in Ireland entails war) is the stuff of literature” and the role of women is to “serve the men actively engaged in the fight” (2). The fact that O’Connor dismisses women’s ability to write about this revolutionary era—and forgets the fact that they did—is,

Weekes notes, typical of the “single lens fashioned by male dictums of ‘literature,’ ‘greatness,’ and ‘significance’” which long governed literary assessment of all kinds (3). But it is also an attitude which has had a lasting effect on perceptions of what counts as Irish literature.

One result of this perspective is that male Anglo-Irish writers, such as the poet William

Butler Yeats and dramatist John Millington Synge, are usually celebrated as the representative voices of the era. These writers were actively engaged in the Irish Literary Revival movement which at the turn of the century sought to reconnect modern Irish identity with an imagined pre- colonial Irishness that was thought to be primarily Gaelic and definitely non-English in nature.

There is certainly no question that these were masterful writers who produced magnificent and important literary works. But the masculine and nationalist bias that has elevated them to iconic status32 has tended to obscure the fact that Irish literary life of the period was as complex and multifaceted as Irish life itself.

In recent decades critics have begun to revisit those works “othered” by this nationalist focus, 33 but with predictably contradictory results. So, for example, the nationalist critic Seamus

Deane views the current interest in Anglo-Irish Big House literature as little more than a demonstration of “the comparative poverty of the Irish novelistic tradition” (32), while another critic claims such writing is completely in line with the tenor of the modernist era because it

32 Vernon Ingraham’s claim that these men were “Olympian figures [who] stride amidst the powerful forces surrounding them, working their magic out of the turmoil that encompassed them . . . through the power of true art” (xv) is indicative of this trend. 33 I use the term “othered” here, conscious of the irony that the writers I am talking about have usually been charged with “othering” colonized “others”—by which is usually meant a “native” population. The term was coined by Gayatri Spivak to describe the process through which “imperial discourse creates its ‘others,’ its colonial subjects” 89 expresses nostalgia for unity “in a world of disorder, lost faith and world chaos” (Kennedy 27).

Between these two extremes are many interesting perspectives which seek to reinsert Anglo-Irish writing into our contemporary consciousness of the nationalist period in Ireland and see it as something more than the imperialist desire of an unrepentantly colonialist culture. As Declan

Kiberd has so succinctly noted, many Irish texts made important and influential connections between the Irish present and Ireland’s Gaelic past, but there are also many which registered the fact that since time immemorial Irish identity has seldom been “straightforward and given, more often a matter of negotiation and exchange” (1).

“Two of a Trade”

Among the latter kinds of texts are the works of Edith Somerville and Violet Martin, who wrote and published under the joint pseudonym of “Somerville and Ross” and enjoyed enormous popularity during the first decades of the twentieth century. They were cousins, members of an Anglo-Irish family whose various branches had been in Ireland for centuries,34 and they spent most of their lives living and working in the West Country, outside the immediate bounds of Irish or English metropolitan society. They lived in daily contact with the people they wrote about, whether people of the Anglo-Irish gentry class to which they belonged, or the various classes of Gaelic- and non-Gaelic Irish who peopled the towns, villages, and farms of the

West Country. They thought of themselves as Irish writers and in their works sought to document as nearly as possible the gradually changing face of Irish culture. Unlike their Irish

Revivalist contemporaries, they did not feel the need to tease out the traces of Ireland’s mythic,

(Ashcroft et al. 171), but in this situation the nationalist discourse functions in much the same way as the imperialist one it is attempting to distance itself from. 34 The Martin family could trace its roots to one of the Tribes of Galway and had occupied lands in Connemara since Elizabethan times. They had a long tradition as Royalists and Roman Catholics and only converted to Protestantism 90

Gaelic past in the present. Instead, they viewed Irish culture as vigorous, malleable, and the product of innumerable negotiations between the many cultural influences which had passed through it over the centuries. Contrary to the popular, nationalist conception that the Anglo-Irish were more Anglo than Irish, Somerville and Ross did not feel themselves to be English to any significant degree. They did not even think of themselves as having a hyphenated identity because for them Anglo-Irishness was just one of many ways of being Irish. As Edith

Somerville once noted, “my family has eaten Irish food and shared Irish life for nearly three hundred years, and if that doesn’t make me Irish I might as well say I was Scotch, or Norman, or

Pre-Diluvian!” (qtd. in Lewis, Somerville 164-165).

Yet, as Gifford Lewis notes, “New Ireland has never claimed Somerville and Ross as her own” (119), and in many ways this is not surprising. Their view of Ireland as a multicultural nation in which individual identity is an inexorable, and sometimes capricious, mix of class, religion, and race has not always been easy to reconcile with the agendas of nationalist-minded groups. As Ireland moved toward nationhood in the early years of the twentieth century, Irish nationalists sought to formulate a new identity for independent Ireland. In many cases, this meant eradicating all vestiges of England’s colonial occupation and, most particularly, the influence of the Ascendancy class to which Somerville and Ross belonged.35

The fact that Somerville and Ross were members of a class that developed its particular social, political, and economic identity from the spoils of English conquest—however ancient— has also meant that they have not always fared well among contemporary postcolonial theorists.

in the 1830s. The Somervilles were descended from religious refugees from Scotland, Episcopalians who fled the violence of the Scottish Reformation and settled in the West Country in 1690. 35 Gifford Lewis notes that in the early years of the Troubles many Anglo-Irish tried to distance themselves from the English “so sure were they of their Irishness, and of the voluntary nature of their link to England” (Somerville 175). What they could not and did not forsee is that “there were coming generations of Irish men and women who would be as incapable of understanding” the Anglo-Irish as the English were “incapable of understanding the Irish” (Somerville 176). 91

In 1989 David Martin dismissed them as “colonial writers” whose “values, standards, and outlook are [so] English” that they cannot “even grasp the nature of the conflict which was to destroy their class” (53). As late as 2000, Paul Deane charged that their sketches of Irish life were “deplorable examples of racial attack” (17). These are, of course, criticisms which take extreme positions, but it is worth noting how enduring and influential the view has been that

Somerville and Ross were somehow unsympathetic to “real” Irishness because they were members of the Anglo-Irish gentry.

The odd position of the Anglo-Irish—of simultaneously belonging to and, from the early nineteenth century onwards, gradually being estranged from the communities they inhabited— was, as noted earlier, immensely conducive to the production of creative works. It was also hauntingly similar to the position Julia Kristeva claims for women in modern, Western culture in general. Throughout her work Kristeva forges parallels between the experience of foreignness or living in exile and the female subject’s experience of “living in the male order of things, of belonging and yet not quite fitting” (Smith 78).36 Because women learn from an early age that they must specify their identity in the language of the symbolic and yet know themselves rooted in experience registered in the semiotic, they can become intensely attuned to the illusory nature of the discourses of the symbolic. To varying degrees they understand that the language, the discourses of the symbolic which are indispensable to the construction of their identity, are at heart illusory because they cannot encompass the richness of experience as they know it. Over time, women can become acutely aware that the discourses of the symbolic are actually elements of the “game” necessary for human existence. They realize that it is “not that [the symbolic] is

36 The most comprehensive expressions of this focus are to be found Strangers To Ourselves, “Bulgaria, My Love,” and “On the Extraneousness of the Phallus; or, the Feminine Between Illusion and Disillusion.” 92 nothing, but it is not everything either or even a veiled everything” (Kristeva, “Extaneousness”

100).37

One of the striking consistencies in Somerville and Ross’s work is an awareness of the tensions that arise when conflicting perceptions of reality, particularly Irish reality, collide.

These authors make their audience aware that, in Kristeva’s terms, the construction of identity and perspective are part of a game. In this game the rules are usually acknowledged by a wider circle of participants, but these rules are not so hard and fast that they cannot be changed when a player decides it is time to implement a different set of rules. And this is not surprising, since in their own lives Edith Somerville and Violet Martin often had to rely on their ability to reconcile the conflicting demands of the various discourses which cluttered the experience of Anglo-Irish women at the turn of the century. In Ireland marriage and property considerations had been inextricably intertwined for centuries,38 but for the Anglo-Irish, whose income prior to the Land

Acts of the nineteenth century was almost completely dependent upon their property, marriage or the strategic alliances of their sons and daughters was of paramount interest. In post-famine

Anglo-Irish society “the control of women’s property through the idea of ‘coverture’ and the increasing implementation of primogeniture” meant the enforcement of traditional gender roles and behaviors for men and women (Luddy 32). Though there was some loosening of these strictures as the economic and political destruction of the Anglo-Irish class progressed, their

37 Kristeva illustrates this awareness with a wonderful word play: “ The phallus that ‘I’ invest is what makes me a subject of language and of law; there ‘I’ am. There is something else, however, a je ne sais quoi. Nonetheless, ‘I’ enter the game, ‘I’ want some, too, ‘I’ play along. It’s only a game (jeu), it’s only an ‘I’ (je), ‘I’ am pretending, and this for the female subject, is indeed the so-called truth of the signifier or the speaking being” (“Extraneousness” 100). 38 Valerie Pakenham notes that during the heyday of Anglo-Irish rule Ireland was “notorious for attempted abductions by hard-up younger sons or squireens . . . . Under the law, if some dubious clergyman or ‘couple-beggar’ could ‘persuade’ the abducted girl to marry in front of witnesses the marriage was legally binding” (77). Abductions were no longer common by the mid-nineteenth century, but the importance of making a fortuitous alliance remained. 93 ability to influence an individual’s destiny both in theory and in practice, as Somerville and Ross well knew, was very much alive and well.39

In some respects, Edith Somerville and Violet Martin did adhere to the conservative gender expectations of their class. Unlike that other celebrated pair of Anglo-Irishwomen, the

“Ladies of Llangolen,”40 they remained dutiful daughters, they were conscientious Protestant ladies, and they spent a great deal of their energies and money on the upkeep of their families and family estates. But in all this both women clearly understood the discrepancies that existed between the gender-specific behaviors demanded of them by the governing social discourse and the behaviors actually needed for life structured by that discourse to function. So, for example, though the family estates were legally the property of male relatives to whom they had to accede authority when required,41 there were periods when both Edith Somerville and Violet Martin were the major contributors to the running and financing of Drishane and Ross respectively.

This situation was, of course, not without its difficulties, and the inability of her male relatives to fulfill the roles expected of them by Anglo-Irish culture once led Edith Somerville to write, “the longer I live the less opinion I have of men’s business capacity. With but few exceptions, they are impulsive and untrustworthy and dishonest—in our family anyway” (qtd. in Lewis,

Somerville 115).

39 Gifford Lewis claims that Edith Somerville’s choice to remain unmarried was in good part the result of her father’s refusal to allow her to marry Hewitt Poole in 1887. Poole was not considered wealthy enough or to have sufficient social connections (Somerville 38). Lewis also blames the fact that both Somerville and Violet Martin had to use side-saddles when riding and hunting for both the fall that led to the development of the brain tumor that killed Martin and the problems with numbness Somerville experienced in her right hip later in life. 40 In 1778 two young Anglo-Irish women, Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler, ran away together to Wales in order to escape the expectations of the class to marry. The home they set up in Llangolen, Wales, became a favorite “port of call for distinguished visitors on their way to and from Ireland,”and they became “the two most celebrated virgins in Europe” (Pakenham 81). 41 This was particularly problematic for Violet Martin and her mother. The two refurbished the Ross estate after years of neglect, only to have to step aside when the legal heir, Violet’s older brother Robert, and his wife decided to take up residence there. Robert’s wife was officially expected to have precedence in the household, and this led to strained relations between her and Robert’s mother, who had presided in the home since her husband’s death. 94

But what has perhaps been most disorienting for critics who look at the lives and work of these women is that, where on the one hand they appear to adhere to certain traditional, gendered behaviors, they just as easily slip out of the categories modern Western culture uses to classify writers and their literary works.42 “Of all the major Irish writers,” claims Declan Kiberd, “Edith

Somerville and Martin Ross . . . are the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness” (69).

Kiberd goes on to explain that this difficulty is due to a disjunction between what readers believe themselves to be dealing with and their actual experience of the texts. Reading Somerville and

Ross’s writing, “readers have struggled to reconcile the seemingly superficial nature of their subject-matter with the near absolute command of human experience evident in the success of their presentations” (Kiberd 69). This disjunction between expectation and experience permeates most aspects of Somerville and Ross’s artistic life and work. Though intensely creative people, they could not and did not subscribe to the ideal of the artist who lives for art alone—their gender, their multiple talents, their wide-ranging interests, and their family obligations made that impossible. Though passionately invested in representing the Irishness of the Irish people at a time when such representations were of tantamount political interest, they chose not to do so in ways which associated them with politically oriented literary communities such as the Irish

Revival.43 And, perhaps most disconcerting of all, they wrote as a literary partnership.

42 Shawn Mooney also suggests that one of the reasons Somerville and Ross’s critics have had a difficult time classifying these authors is that—as for Lucas Malet—the women’s life choices make them hard to align with the categories usually used for this era. He notes that “as confirmed spinsters in intense collaboration, as committed suffragists, and as women whose emotional bond endured beyond the grave, Edith Somerville and Violet Martin elude sexual classification in ways that illuminate both the historical emergence of sexological discourses in response to the cross-cultural phenomenon of New Women, and the problematic issues of definition and identity in current historical studies of sexuality” (157). 43 In 1905 Martin wrote to Somerville that Lady Gregory and Yeats had tried to persuade them to write a play for the Abbey Street Theater. Martin had politely refused on the grounds that they were “full up.” Her distrust of the project was solidified when Lady Gregory divulged that they wanted a “Shoneen play,” which Martin supposed “means middle class vulgarity,” and that the Revivalists were to “give [them] all the hints necessary for stage effects etc.” (Lewis, Letters 274). In the same letter it is clear that Martin also distrusted the Revivalists’ wish to ally themselves with the Irish upper class. There was something suspect, she felt, in the fact that in 1905 they were “anxious now to rope in the upper classes, and to drop politics” (Lewis, Letters 274). 95

In Writing Double: Women’s Literary Partnerships, Bette London argues that, although most literary work is at some level the result of collaboration, the kind of literary partnership

Somerville and Ross practiced estranged them from the notion of “the author” which has prevailed in Western society for centuries. It is true that in more recent years feminist and poststructuralist critics have questioned the idea of “the author” as a unified, solitary voice in their theoretical work.44 But, London claims, interest in the practical application of such theory—particularly with regard to the kind of literal co-authorship practiced by Somerville and

Ross—has been slow to materialize. This is because “the idea of the solitary author is so deeply entrenched as to leave no room for other possible configurations” (London 3). Female collaborators like Somerville and Ross have been regularly dismissed as “amateurs no matter how professionally they operated [because] no matter how sustained these partnership ventures” were, there exists a persistent belief that collaborative writing is “ultimately apprenticeship for some future apotheosis where the author would be singular” (London 9).

The letters that passed between Edith Somerville and Violet Martin document their constant struggle against such attitudes, within both their own families and British society at large,45 but even among contemporary critics there has been a reluctance to accept the seamlessly

44 In the late 1960s the poststructuralist critics, Michele Foucault and Roland Barthes questioned the validity of the notion a work’s single, solitary author in their essays “What Is An Author?” and “The Death of the Author,” respectively. London makes the interesting observation that although many feminist critics embraced the idea of the double-handed, double-voiced female writer, they tended to see the duality as an internal, metaphorical one because women writers were so often “divided against themselves” by the patriarchal structure of modern Western society (2).Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s seminal work The Madwoman in the Attic, though written collaboratively, actually focuses on metaphorical collaborations that occur between the divided selves of women writers and has had the perhaps unintended effect of pushing “women’s actual collaborations even further into the margins” (2). It is also worth noting that Gilbert and Gubar chose not to include any work by Somerville and Ross in their otherwise exhaustive Norton Anthology of Literature By Women: The Traditions in English. 45 In Irish Memories Edith Somerville lists the various terms that family members used to describe Somerville and Martin’s foray into the literary profession. In these family circles the novel was variously referred to as “The Shocker,” “The Shaughraun,” or “that nonsense of the girls,” while the writers themselves were called “The Shockers,” “The Geniuses,” and “The Huggermuggerers.” Edith Somerville describes their treatment in typically humorous fashion when she says they were “treated with much the same disapproving sufferance that is shown to an outside dog who sneaks into the house on a wet day” (Irish Memories 131). 96 collaborative nature of their writing. Critics such as Cresap Watson, Hilary Robinson, and, most recently, Julian Moynahan have all tried to tease out the specific contributions each writer made to the collaborative works. After exhaustive comparisons of the texts Somerville and Ross wrote as a team with the ones they wrote alone, these critics come to a similar conclusion: that Martin was the “better,” more serious “poet,” while Somerville was the humorist, “the painter” of the scenes (Robinson 38-39 & Moynahan 164-178).46 Such an assessment is based on the erroneous assumption that the creative process Somerville and Ross used was like the piecing together of a mosaic—Somerville wrote the scenery sections, Martin wrote the profound, human interest sections, and they then strung them together. But one only has to look at the series of letters that went back and forth as the women worked on “the Shocker” which eventually became An Irish

Cousin to see that such an assumption is simply false.47 These letters document the exhaustive process of negotiation and renegotiation—of words, phrases, nuances of character and plot— which gradually shaped their ideas into a novel of singular force. Throughout the years of their collaboration, Somerville and Ross depended on the combination of their abilities, and in her own mind Edith Somerville continued this dependence even after Violet Martin’s death in 1915.

The issue of interest here is what Somerville and Ross’s depictions of women’s lives have to say about the ways women negotiated their positions as women, colonizers, and colonized in that particular British colonial place during the heyday years of British imperialism.

The complexity of the relationship between Ireland and England during this period of nationalist

46 In some respects their assessment may have been influenced by Somerville’s own comments in “Two of a Trade,” an essay she wrote in 1949. Here she made the comment that “I believe I am right in attributing to my Cousin the more . . . poetic feeling for words, and a sense of Style . . .. And I believe that possibly my profession as a painter, has helped and developed my feeling of colour, and sense of form” (186). But these comments come at the end of a long discussion of the mutuality of their writing. 47 As we see Edith Somerville pleading for the love scene she inserted on pages 71 and 72 (Lewis, Letters 63) or Violet Martin congratulating Somerville on being “a heaven born correcter—a spy-crack of the most unfailing and the most courageous—a truly reliable coadjutor” (Lewis, Letters 61) it is clear that the process they used was lengthy, sometimes contentious, but always mutually rewarding for the two women. 97 agitation and social and political turbulence does haunt the pages of Somerville and Ross’s work, but it is important to note that it is rarely addressed directly. Instead, Somerville and Ross chose to tackle the thorniest of problems through depictions of the commonplace, everyday lives of people who considered themselves as Irish as the much mythologized “green hills.” What they had to say about the way Irish women structured their identity did, of course, change over time, and it is to this that I will now turn.

An Irish Cousin. (1889).

When Edith Somerville and Violet Ross began work on An Irish Cousin, it was not, as for Lucas Malet, to create a diversion from the dullness of their lives or even the natural extension of their family’s interests.48 Instead, it was an outgrowth of the pleasure they had experienced while working together on the Buddh Dictionary49 and the very practical wish to make some money. Living in a culture which depended on male primogeniture, they were well aware of the precarious position unmarried women occupied in the social structure, and they saw their joint authorship as a way to avoid some of the difficulties financial dependence on others would have occasioned. Both women had already had some experience with the publication industry separately—Edith Somerville had placed some illustrations and “short pieces” in magazines and journals, and Violet Martin had had several articles published prior to their collaboration. But it was on this joint venture that their hopes for some financial independence were founded. So, for example, when Edith Somerville found she could not travel to Ross for a visit because of the expense, she asked Martin to “wait till we begin to collar something out of

48 In fact, throughout their correspondence Somerville and Martin complained bitterly to one another about the obligations forced upon them by their respective families, none of whom took their writing endeavors seriously or saw any reason to privilege the demands of writing over the demands of the families’ very busy social lives. See in particular Somerville’s letter to Martin on January 21st, 1888 (Lewis, Letters 63-64). 98 the Shocker and then we’ll see” (Lewis, Letters 71). Authorship has, of course, never been a certain money-making venture. But the fact that both women clearly expected the novel to generate some funds is indicative of their faith in their product, in their business savvy, and their abilities as writers to speak to an audience of their contemporaries.

Interestingly, one contemporary critical debate concerning An Irish Cousin has developed out of the notion that their admitted mercenary goals make the novel somehow suspect as a

“serious” literary work,50 and in her later depiction of events in Irish Memories, Edith Somerville herself describes how the two women began work on the novel “in idleness and without conviction” (Irish Memories 132). Although their families’ disdain of the project had the “usual effect” of increasing the writers’ resolve into “enthusiasm,” it was actually a significant, shared experience which changed their initial “insincere ambition of a ‘Penny Dreadful’” into a

“genuine literary impulse” (IM 132-134). This experience is described in the often-quoted story of Somerville and Martin’s visit to a reclusive female relative. As they were leaving, they saw a pale face “glimmer” for a moment in a window above the hall door, and at that moment, the two women are said to have realized that the reality of Irish/Irish relations was far more shocking than anything they could imagine or invent. Centuries of illicit sexual relations between the ruling class and the Gaelic-Irish poor who served them had produced “half-acknowledged, half- witted, wholly horrifying . . . living ghosts [who haunted] the house that gave them but half their share of life” (IM 134). In this version of events, then, the novel’s purpose changed course mid- writing. Though it was begun for purely mercenary reasons, a kind of moral outrage forced the writers into the business of writing more “serious” fiction than first imagined. But once this

49 The Buddh Dictionary was a compilation of words, terms, and phrases unique to and ubiquitous among the families descended from their common ancestor, Sir Charles Kendal Busche. 50 See Kreilkamp’s discussion of Somerville, Cronin, and Robinson in the footnotes of 115-117. 99 happened, their aspirations became for “the ideal of Art [which] rose there for us, hidden in clouds, yet never quite lost or forgotten” (134).

This version of events does certainly surround the creation of An Irish Cousin with a rather neat, evolutionary aura, and it makes the experience a joint one. But it is worth remembering that Edith Somerville chose to tell it during the period of profound mourning which followed Violet Martin’s death in 1915. Perhaps one indication that it is a fantasy construction is that it contains the kind of rather overblown, romanticized parallels between the appearance of nature and the emotion of the characters which critics so readily deplore in Mount Music.51 But even more telling is a letter from Violet Martin to Edith Somerville in 1889 in which she credits

Edith with having both the experience and the idea to write the novel:

I seem to remember very much the first beginnings of the Shocker just now—

when as I was humping over the Dumpy and you were mucking with paints at the

window you told me of the old maniac’s face at the window over the Whs door—

and remember that you were the person who suggested that we should try

together to write a shocker or story of sorts on that foundation—and you were the

person who lifted us through the first chapters. ( Lewis, Letters 143)

Though it may not seem important which version of events is given precedence, the later,

Irish Memories version has had an interesting effect on the niche An Irish Cousin occupies in literary assessments of Somerville and Ross’s work. Because the story indicates an indecision on the part of the writers, an initial lack of purpose, or a willingness to be satisfied with producing less than “literary” material, An Irish Cousin has, as Vera Kreilkamp notes, been

“generally dismissed as an awkward piece of gothic apprentice work, of interest primarily 100 because of their later success in the mode of social realism” (115). It is true that the novel abounds with gothic conventions, and there is a certain “creakiness of its plot mechanisms”

(Kreilkamp 115).52 But if we assume that the work was the result of a sustained, purposeful effort, our analysis will necessarily have a different outcome from an approach which assumes that the novel’s value is in what it can tell us about the “better” works that were to follow.

This is of particular importance if we approach the work from the Kristevan stance that women can be acutely aware of the essentially illusory nature of the symbolic discourses that construct them. Edith Somerville’s later apparent acceptance of the idea that their work on An

Irish Cousin only gained some really “literary” value once it was flavored by the wish to reveal the morally corrupt nature of Irish/Irish relations is, in some respects, a mode of playing the

“game.” This does not mean that what she said was completely untrue, but from Martin’s letter and the women’s correspondence throughout the period of this work’s development, it seems clear that the two thought rather differently at the time. Even if the initial idea and experience were Edith’s, the novel was clearly the result of multiple negotiations, renegotiations, and the bridging of creative impasses. In other words, the discrepancies of style that, for certain critics are mostly indicative of the authors’ inexperience can be viewed as part of a methodology. The discrepancies allow Somerville and Ross to express the discrepancies individuals experience when the language they normally use to narrate experience fails to approximate the extraordinary. It is often in moments of great emotional engagement that our language fails us,

51 “The sunset was red in the west [at the] precise moment that into the Irish Cousin some thrill of genuineness was breathed,” and as they rode home talking about the incident, they saw “the fires of the sunset sink into the sea, and met the crescent moon coming with faint light to lead us home” (Memories 133). 52 Krielkamp and Robinson note the stylistic connection between Sheridan Le Fanu’s supernatural thriller Uncle Silas and Somerville and Ross’s An Irish Cousin. In both works an orphaned girl reveals the source of malevolence in a great house, a malevolence that is echoed in the surrounding natural world and uncanny happenings inside the house itself. 101 and we grasp for the ready-made comfort of stereotypes, such as the romance of a sunset to add drama to an important moment in time.

Key to this methodology in An Irish Cousin is the novel’s narrator, Theodora Sarsfield, who is both a central player in the novel’s action and the consummate product of an Imperial

British upbringing. Like many white, middle-class members of the British colonial places, she is in the odd position of both seeming to belong to the colonial society she chooses to join and being very much an outsider. Though Theo thinks of Great Britain as “home” and herself as a

British citizen,53 she was born in Canada to a Canadian mother and an expatriated Irishman.54

She grew up listening to fairytale-like stories of “the old country,” was educated at schools in

Europe, and after her mother’s death is adrift in the Empire, searching for both a place and identity that will satisfy her longing to belong. When life on her mother’s relatives ranch in the

Canadian wilderness proves unappealing, she decides to try her luck with her father’s people in

Ireland. In other words, when things don’t go so well in one British colonial place, it is a logical step for her to set out on one of those inter-colonial journeys Katie Trumpener calls

“transperiferal circuits of influence” (234). She arrives in Ireland seasick and disoriented, but hopeful that her future’s “secret was, perhaps, hidden among those blue Irish hills, which were waiting for me to come and prove what they had in store for me” (IC 2).

Theo is a rather remarkable portrait of the kind of modern, British woman Somerville and

Ross tended to use as a foil for their Anglo-Irish heroines in later works. Unlike the latter, she is not fey or attuned to the semiotic resonances of Irish place, and she does not have a compassionate or even sympathetic vision of Irish society. Instead she has the critical,

53 In an unguarded moment she blurts out to her uncle that she is so “thankful to get back to Great Britain again” (IC 16), and she takes great pains to explain to the curious ladies at Clashmore that she is, in fact, a British rather than Canadian citizen. 102 judgmental perspective of a middle-class colonialist who, after years of indoctrination into what

Declan Kiberd calls “the idea of Ireland” (2), is more concerned with how well what she sees fits her expectations than with accepting what really exists. Theo is not as interested in coming to an understanding of the complexities that construct Irish society as she is in adjudicating what kind of Irishness she is prepared to accept and what not. So, for example, she is pleased at the

“genial tone and eccentric grammar” of the note her Irish cousin, Willy, leaves for her at the dock because they were “quite in keeping with my ideas of an Irishman” (IC 5). She doesn’t appreciate Willy’s pride in his country when, on looking at the beautiful landscape around

Roaring Bay, he exclaims “You haven’t anything to beat that in Canada, I’ll bet” (IC 13) however; instead she sees his comment as an expression of ignorance and provinciality.

Although Theo’s view of Ireland as a place is gradually modified as the action progresses, her appreciation of the Irish people and their culture does not really follow suit. Like many a colonizer, Theo learns to love the land, but prefers it without the “natives” and their culture. After a week at Durrus, she comes to the conclusion that she will never go back to

America because “already the idea of leaving [Ireland] was akin to that of emigration” (IC 93).

At first she speculates that the reason for this sudden attachment to the place could be due to an

“inherited instinct” (IC 93), but this tidy explanation is soon demolished when she is confronted by the Irish ways of the tenants of Durrus. At their festivities for Willy’s birthday, she holds herself aloof, critical, and appalled at the event’s uncouthness. The piper’s music is described as

“a succession of grunts and squeals of varying discordancy,” and it is with true distaste that she sees her cousin dance with a buxom countrywoman, “covering himself with glory by the number and intricacy of his steps” (IC 162). At this gathering Theo realizes that “in spite of my Sarsfield

54 Canada was given the designation “Dominion of Canada” in 1867, and though it had a central government of its own, it was still a British colony and its citizens British citizens. A new constitution was signed by Elizabeth II in 103 blood [I was] a stranger in a strange land” (IC 163). When the tenants send up a cheer in her honor, her response is to retreat “precipitately into the darkness [and] hope they don’t expect me to make a speech” (IC 165).

Theo’s distaste for the ways of the Durrus tenants is in some ways quite curious since her life experience to date had not been particularly sheltered from colonial realities. She had, after all, spent the last two years in the Canadian wilderness helping care for a family of fourteen, and she intimates that her mother had a hard time making ends meets once her father died. And yet, in this strange land, she holds to specific ideas of appropriate and inappropriate behavior for people of all classes. To a significant degree this is due to her sense that as a British place

Ireland should run according to British rules; but it is also related to her desire to force the

Ireland of her reality to fit the Ireland of her imagination. By insisting that the standards of behavior she learned as a middle-class woman in Canada should be in place in Ireland as well,

Theo actually blinds herself to the nature of many things she sees or hears. So, for example, when she overhears Anstey Brian pleading with a man, Theo comprehends Anstey’s painful position as a woman rejected by a man, but she concludes that Anstey’s lover must be an Irish stable boy because that would be the only appropriate coupling for a young woman of Anstey’s culture and class that Theo can imagine.

Theo’s inability to appreciate the hybrid quality of Irish culture, and the fact that even at its most aristocratic, it is a mix of the unique qualities of various cultures tempered by time, also means that she tends to misread the connections between certain culture-based behaviors and an individual’s class. When individuals adopt Irish behaviors that fall outside the limits of what she considers appropriate for the British upper classes, they are, in her eyes, effectively demoted to a lower order. Even those members of this snippet of Irish society who have aristocratic

1982. 104 pretensions, such as The O’Niell, are viewed with suspicion when their behavior seems too closely allied to that of the lower class Irish. Though Theo was at first “rather nervous at the idea of meeting an Irish chieftain in his own lair” and worried whether she should kiss his hand or not (IC 115), the fact that he is a wheezy, red-faced old man who flirts outrageously with younger women soon dispels her awe of him and his social standing. The only people Theo has no trouble accepting as her social equals are the O’Niell children, members of her own class and generation whose behaviors have, like hers, been modified by sojourns in England and fit the

English middle-class values Theo believes she abides by.

But because of her expectations, Theo is often confronted by a discrepancy between her categorization of an individual and that individual’s actual status in the social order. She is surprised, for example, by the reverence and respect with which the Durrus tenants greet Willy at his birthday festivity. She herself has placed him the category of being “a pleasant companion” who “could not be said to be either cultured or refined” (IC 94), so the fact that one old man kisses Willy’s hand and claims Willy is the “the root and branch of your grandfather’s family”

(IC 161) seems incongruous with her assessment of him. What makes Willy so suspect for Theo is his unqualified hybridity, the fact that he is an acknowledged member of the ruling class and yet has behaviors that are thoroughly permeated by his constant exposure to and intimate understanding of Gaelic-Irish culture. As Theo watches him move so easily among the various levels of Irish society, she both admires this facility and finds it somewhat troubling because it is so different from what she expects of British gentry.

Caught up in the demands of a discourse that cannot quite make sense of her experience,

Theo is often at a loss at how to respond to her Irish companions’ assessments of people, places, and situations. At the Jackson-Croly’s ball, for example, she has an easier time understanding 105

Nugent’s “expression of melancholy” at having to dance “a duty dance with one of the Misses

Jackson-Croly” than she does Willy’s “charging with [Miss. Mimi Burke] through the throng at a reckless speed” (178). And yet she sees Nugent’s father, the O’Niell, watch his son’s behavior with “a laugh of mingled contempt and self-complacency.” The O’Niell considers his son “a regular muff,” and asks, “Who’d ever think he was a son of mine? If I were dancing with a spicy little girl like that, I wouldn’t look as if I were at my own funeral” (IC 178-179). As always,

Theo refrains from commenting on an assessment that is so markedly different from her own, but it is not without conscious irony that she explains the reason for her silence. “Before I had time for a counter suggestion,” she notes, “we were again hopping and spinning around the room” (IC

179). At this dance Theo clearly feels that she is caught up in a whirlwind of action over which she has little or no control, and under such circumstances she believes that any discussion according to the rules she adheres to is useless.

The problem Theo faces as she tries to read Irish society through her generic British middle-class lens is that there is no easy way to reconcile her expectations with the realities of colonial life in Ireland. One may equate certain culture-based behaviors with specific classes and so view the crossing of class lines as a kind of miscegenation, but the absolute certainty of such assessments will eventually be undermined by experiences which defy the truth of this easy categorization. This is particularly true of Ireland where, as noted earlier, long centuries of intermarriage and other kinds of genetic mixing produced a culture of great uncertainty where racial purity was concerned.55 In Kristevan terms, because the discourses that construct such categories as race and class are at heart illusory, inexplicable schisms can appear between that

55 Gifford Lewis notes that both Edith Somerville and Martin Ross were avid chroniclers of their families’ histories. The Anglo-Irish had a mania for genealogy. Gifford Lewis suggests that the genealogical trees created by many Irish families were “articles of faith, fictions based on the flimsiest evidence. Irish families had lost their descents 106 which is experienced and the language one can find to express it. What bubbles up through the cracks of symbolic discourse at such times are those elements of experience which one believes abjected, controlled out of existence by the bonds of language. The subject, “weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within” (Kristeva,

Powers 5). But though such an experience can be one of incredible illumination, it may also be one of absolute destruction because by its very nature the “the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject” (Kristeva, Powers 5).

Theo’s inability to reconcile her experiences in Ireland with the discourses that she has used to construct her identity eventually brings her to such a point. Prior to coming to Ireland she “had taken for granted that I must be a hard-headed, hard-hearted person” who could offer

“cold-blooded counsels of common-sense” to her more sentimental friends (IC 226). And for a large part of the action she manages to keep that construction of herself intact by consciously naming and categorizing her various experiences according to the rules of the discourse of her choosing. But by the end of the novel, however, we see her torn by intense emotions for which she has no name and even saying things “firmly” which she never meant to say at all. So, when she comes upon Willy after he has been told of the fratricide, criminal actions, illicit sexual relations, and deceit which allowed his father and himself to inherit Durrus, Theo is so overwhelmed by the experience that she loses touch with her “normal” self and does what she always said she did not want—she asks Willy to marry her. During this interview, Theo says “it seemed to me as if I were listening to some one else speaking,” but she continues in this vein until she is shocked back into her usual self-possession by Willy’s assertion that he is already married to Anstey Brian (IC 275-276).

through disuse and lack of interest, and many Anglo-Irish families cloaked their humble origins in grandiosity” (Somerville 112). 107

Perhaps one of the greatest ironies of this novel is that, for much of the action, Theo does assume that she has the upper hand where Ireland and the Irish are concerned. The blue Irish hills she sees at the beginning of the novel are, from her perspective, just “waiting for me to come and prove what they had in store” (IC 2), and when things don’t go quite right, she believes that she is so unencumbered that she can leave at will. What Theo does not realize is that once she enters the entangled world of Irish/Irish relations, she will be acted upon and used by it as well. In spite her own intentions, Theo is a catalyst because her entry into Durrus society is read rather differently by its inhabitants than she reads it herself

From the perspective of Durrus society, Theo’s coming to Durrus is a return rather than a beginning because, when they look at her, they do not just see Willy’s Canadian cousin who has come to see what she can see. Instead, Theo is the reincarnation of Durrus’s legitimate male heir, her father Owen, and for various reasons, the inhabitants of Durrus look to her for redemption from the fallen state in which they find themselves. Her connection to the “masther” lineage is underscored in several ways. She is named for her paternal grandfather, Theodore

Sarsfield, whose precipitous actions set the series of events in motion that lead to Durrus’s decline.56 She looks so uncannily like her father that she is constantly followed by reverent sighs such as “Himself’s afther sayin’ . . . that he’d think ‘twas your father he was lookin’ at, an you sittin’ there a while ago” (IC 142). She is given the room next to the one that had been her father’s, which places her physically in the position he once occupied. Theo takes note of all these signs, but because she is constantly looking outside Durrus for an indication of what her

56 Theodore Sarsfield’s inability to sanction his eldest son’s attempts to forge an identity for himself created the rift which allowed Theo’s Uncle Dominick to usurp Theo’s father’s position. Dominick’s insecurities about the legitimacy of his position meant that he then depended on a series of illicit and criminal actions which were completed in part with the help of his mistress, Moll Hourihane. 108 destiny will be, she is rarely willing to accept the roles Durrus society wants to foist upon her.57

The result is that for most of the action, she remain unconscious of what her coming to Durrus actually means, and it is only when she watches in horror as her Uncle Dominick’s construction of reality come crashing down around their ears that she realizes the profoundly important role she has unwittingly played.

Theo’s unconscious intervention ultimately leads to the purging of all kinds of illegitimacy at Durrus and thus, for a time, its redemption. Dominick and Moll are both consumed by the same bog in which they had thought to hide the evidence of Owen’s murder; the will which denied Theo her rightful inheritance is revealed to be a forgery; Willy completes his promise to marry Anstey, and they set off for Australia, that haven for colonial misfits of all kinds.58 Durrus is restored to its rightful heir, and the coast is cleared of competing love interests and misunderstandings. This leaves Theo to marry Nugent and thus find her rightful place in the

Empire. So Durrus and its inhabitants are redeemed, but not in the way that anyone—especially that master manipulator Dominick Sarsfield—had thought.

And yet, the novel does not end tidily—as it could have—with Theo and Nugent’s kiss,

“the drawing together, the meeting of the lips, the outrush of soul [that] came without a word, irresistible and unexplainable” (IC 306). It ends with a moment some time later, when Theo and

Nugent are already married, and the ruckus created by Dominick’s usurpation of Owen’s birthright seems to have subsided. It is an odd moment, and we are thrown into it without a great deal of ceremony or explanation. Theo and Nugent are sitting peacefully at Nugent’s home,

57 So, for example, she becomes impatient with the serving people’s viewing of her before the Jackson-Croley ball because it places her in the position of “lady of the house,” a position she is unwilling to fill. And she is equally certain that she cannot marry Willy despite Dominick’s insinuation that her behavior to him thus far “bound [her] in honour” to marry him (IC 236). 58That Willy must now go on a trans-periferal journey is actually correct since according to the rules of primogeniture it should have been Dominick, the laterborn, rather than Owen, the firstborn, who should have had to 109

Clashmore, watching the evening draw in when Nugent makes the comment, “I believe you cared a great deal more for Willy than you did for me.” Theo’s answer is, “I don’t know why I didn’t . . . but somehow, I always liked you best” (IC 306). What is so strange about Theo’s response is that those of us who have followed her throughout the novel know that it simply is not true. Her first impression of Nugent had been that “he thought a good deal of himself” (IC

40), and as readers we cannot forget that it took some time for her even to think well of him.

Where for some time Nugent had made her feel awkward and uncomfortable, she had always found Willy a congenial and attentive partner. So, this claim at the end strikes us as strangely incongruent with what we have known of Theo to date, and we feel that we are not quite the owners of the kind of cathartic experience we thought we were going to be.

One of the criticisms Edith Somerville’s sister Hildegarde had about the writing of An

Irish Cousin was that Violet Martin was “ever too much refined, and too anxious to have anything in [the novel] that was ever in anyone else’s book” (Lewis, Letters 63). What we have with this ending is a clear example of such reticence to be satisfied with literary conventions.

But it is also an ending in keeping with the tenor of the novel as a whole. This short conversation destabilizes any impression one might have that the world of Durrus is now a peaceful paradise where reason, logic, and good sense have taken the place of lies, greed, and unchecked emotion. As we have seen throughout the novel, attempts to simplify human lives to fit tidy formulas are always doomed to failure because that which one must reject in order to make experience fit a specific set of rules will eventually reassert itself. Thus, Theo’s answer is rather wonderful because it indicates how she, too, is bound up in human interactions whose complexity is sometimes beyond the bounds of language. How one articulates one’s feelings or

make his own way in the world. Thus, Willy is now completing a journey he would have had to take anyway if things at Durrus had not been disrupted by Theodore Sarsfield’s anger at his firstborn’s choices. 110 thoughts at a particular moment is not necessarily the only truth about an experience, and it is with this thought that Somerville and Ross chose to end the novel.

An Irish Cousin is not, as the title would seem to indicate, really about Theo’s Anglo-

Irish cousin Willy. It is about those who would come into his world and, instead of looking at the great wealth of what he is, would adjudicate him according to a set of rules which simply don’t fit. As we follow Theo through the process of learning to look beyond her preconceptions, we are given insight into what it takes to balance the discourses we use to make sense of our experience with the sometimes inexpressible nature of those experiences.

Mount Music (1919)

When Edith Somerville set to work compiling and reworking the material that would become Mount Music, both Ireland and her personal situation were dramatically different from what they had been at the publication of An Irish Cousin. In the intervening years, Somerville and Ross had become well-respected and well-published authors, but the fortunes of the Irish

Ascendancy had taken several turns for the worse. In addition, Ireland’s politics and its social fabric were in turmoil as Unionists, Home Rulers, and Republicans all struggled to define

Ireland’s political future. Perhaps most terrible of all for Edith Somerville, Violet Martin had died. There can be little doubt that the loss of her collaborator and dearest friend was devastating for Edith Somerville, and it is understandable that for some time after, she had “no impulse to work, or conviction that she could carry on alone” (Lewis, Somerville 158). But it was characteristic that she did not remain inactive for very long. Violet Martin died on December

21st, 1915, and yet Edith Somerville recovered sufficiently to publish Irish Memories in 1917 and Mount Music in 1919. 111

At the time of Martin’s death, it was generally assumed that Edith Somerville would not continue to write and certainly not to write under the shared pseudonym. The exact nature of their collaborative partnership had been something of a mystery for many of their contemporaries, and, as noted above, the way to solve the discrepancy between expectation and experience by thinking of Violet Martin as “the writer” and Edith Somerville as “the illustrator” of their works So, for example, Kathryn Tynan’s otherwise sensitive and respectful obituary for

Violet Martin mentions Edith Somerville, but in doing so reveals Tynan’s ignorance about the actual nature of Somerville’s contributions. “I do not know,” Tynan says, “how much part Miss.

Somerville had in the books beyond the illustrations, but, in any case, the collaboration is at an end” (qtd. in Lewis, Somerville 110). Tynan’s comment is indicative of the opinion many—if not most—critics and family members held about Edith Somerville’s career in writing. It was, they thought, over, and even when Irish Memories appeared, it was not read as a work in a continuum. It was thought of as Somerville and Ross’s swansong. As one critic wrote, it was both “sad to look on the title-page of Irish Memories, and sorrowful to realize that it is the last on which we shall see the joyous names of E. Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross coupled together”

(qtd. in Lewis, Somerville 110). Clearly few at the time could imagine that Edith Somerville would publish another fourteen works over the next thirty-four years under the “Somerville and

Ross” name.

If the critics were delighted with Irish Memories, but sad at what they thought it implied, then the appearance of Mount Music two years later must have placed them in something of a quandary. Not only was Edith Somerville defying long-held expectations about her abilities as a writer, but she was also insisting that Violet Martin continue their collaboration from beyond the grave. Gifford Lewis notes that spiritualism had been an accepted part of life at Castletownsend 112 since Edith Somerville’s mother, Adelaide, and her siblings developed an interest in it during the

1860s, and Edith Somerville’s own psychic powers had made her a recognized “materializer and stengthener” in their spiritualist circle (Somerville 182). It is, then, not surprising that Edith

Somerville, who during Martin’s lifetime believed she could communicate across physical space with Martin’s mind and spirit, would also believe that she could communicate with Martin across the greatest divide of all—death. Edith Somerville received her first message from Violet Martin via automatic writing in June 1916, the message that “You and I have not finished our work”

(qtd. in Lewis, Somerville 193), and it was to be her firm conviction that their collaboration continued—through mediums and automatic writing—until her own death in 1949. Even in one of her last essays Edith Somerville insisted that “our signature is dual, as it has ever been, and I recognize no reason why I should change it” (“Two or a Trade” 185).

As Bette London reasons, even if one does not accept the spiritualist connection, there is reason to credit the idea. “Ross’s hand” was, after all, still to be found in the “letters, diaries, and notebooks where the cousins collected and recorded” their thoughts, observations, and conversations (London 126), and it was from these materials that Edith Somerville was to draw for the greater part of her latter writing career.59 Edith Somerville herself never doubted that the impetus for her later writing came from the work she and Violet Martin had begun together.60

And, perhaps not surprisingly, this was particularly true of Mount Music.61

59 Somerville and Ross’s practice, at least as recorded around the time of Some Experiences of an Irish R.M., was to create characters by gradually talking and arguing them into existence. Though people often tried to identify friends, family, and acquaintances in their characters through their various characteristics, Edith Somerville claimed that such attempts were bound to fail. This was because “in order to identify an actual representative of any of [their characters], it would be necessary to tear each one of them to pieces, and, collecting the fragments, resume them into a sort of human rag bag” (qtd. in Robinson 43). In other words, their characters were a conglomeration of characteristics the two patched together rather than based on specific humans models. 60 Edith Somerville’s certainty on this subject was expressed in many different ways throughout her later career, but most telling was that she would only accept an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Trinity College, Dublin in 1932 on the condition that “Martin’s name should be associated with hers” (Lewis 230). 61 Edith Somerville solidifies this notion in the novel’s Preface where she writes: “This book was planned some years ago by Martin Ross and myself. A few portions of it were written, and it was then put aside for other work. 113

Unlike most of Somerville and Ross’s works, Mount Music has met with a generally rocky reception from its critics. Hillary Robinson’s analysis of it in her retrospect of Somerville and Ross’s lives and work is, for example, littered with the word “failure,” while Gifford Lewis describes certain scenes of the novel as “unspeakable disasters” (192). These critics see the novel as evidence of Somerville and Ross’s diminished abilities after Violet Martin’s death, the natural result of the partnership’s loss of its “stylist.” For his part, John Cronin finds that “the technique of the novel is noticeably slacker than that of the writers’ best work” (83), but puts the blame for these problems on the difficulty of the subject matter rather than Edith Somerville’s abilities as a writer. He notes that in 1908 the authors abandoned their first attempt at this novel, and so for him it was not “surprising that a task that had daunted their joint talents should prove a strain on the surviving partner’s skill” (81).

In an interesting reversal, though, Vera Kreilkamp has recently set aside the whole question of how well Edith Somerville did without Violet Martin’s input as a living human being and focuses instead on the intimate connections between love, life, religion, and politics in Irish country society that this novel of the Troubles seeks to lay bare. Contrary to most of the earlier commentary, her assessment is largely positive because, instead of being put off by the novel’s sentimental moments, she tries to understand them as part of the writers’ strategy. Kreilkamp agrees that those moments are stylistically problematic, but ultimately finds that Mount Music

“transcends nostalgia and achieves historical objectivity and tough-minded judgment of an

Anglo-Irish society that attempted to ignore history” (Kreilkamp 124). This perspective is innovative because it accepts the novel as the product of Somerville and Ross the literary partnership rather than of Somerville alone, and takes up the very serious issues that the novel

Without her help and inspiration, it would not have been begun, and could not have been completed. I feel, therefore, that to join her name with mine on the title-page is my duty, as well as my pleasure” (5). 114 would like us to consider. Through such an approach, we can look afresh at a work that Edith

Somerville claimed was the product of “Miss. Martin’s idea . . . to ‘open a window in Irish social life’” and about which Edith Somerville felt some nervousness because she was “a little afraid as to whether I have not in some ways, opened the window a little too widely” (qtd. in Robinson

152).

Somerville and Ross’s use of this window metaphor to express the novel’s purpose is particularly appropriate given that the nexus of the novel is a house, the ancestral home of an

Anglo-Irish family. Mount Music House is a quintessential Irish Big House, the product of

English fancy and Irish experience melded over time and generations of Irish living. Physically, it is “large, intensely solid, practical, sensible, of that special type of old Irish country-house that is entirely remote from the character of the men that originated it, and can only be explained as the expiring cry of the English blood” (Mount Music 12). But like the Anglo-Irish themselves, its stolid Englishness has been softened both from the outside and the inside by the Irish life that encompasses it. Its placement in a particularly beautiful and evocative Irish place—“a level plateau of the hill from which it took its name, Cnocán an Cœil Sidhe, which means Hill of Fairy

Music” (MM 12)—moderates its ungraceful appearance, while its Anglo-Irish inhabitants have filled it “gloriously, with horses and hounds, and butts of claret, and hungry, poor relations unto the fourth and fifth generation” (MM 13). This moderation has been both fruitful and successful and is born out by the narrator’s description of the people who inhabited Mount Music had been

“a puissant breed” that has played its part “so staunchly” in the construction of the Empire

(MM13).

Mount Music’s success over the centuries has been due to its inhabitants’ ability to yield to the expediencies of changing realities. By being able both to acknowledge their debt “to their 115

English forbears” and to recognize their “obligations to their Irish mothers’ ancestry” (MM13), they were able to bridge the cultural divide created by their colonization of Irish space and reap the benefits of both their English heritage and their Irish present. But, as the narrator of Mount

Music notes, there had always been a certain weakness in this marriage of lifeways. The jaunty, playful creativity which was so particular to this cultural mix often led to the displacement of responsibilities of the present onto the shoulders of future generations. And the economic system of agriculture and landlording upon which their wealth depended proved extremely vulnerable to the ravages of nature and political wrangling both in Ireland and England. Thus, the Anglo-Irish tendency to see “in wailing there’s nought availing [so] let us be merry before we go” had over time led to “borrowings [that] were by no means limited to cures for sorrow”

(MM13). And such borrowings would make it difficult for them to reconcile this old way of life with the needs of modern Ireland.

The central conflict of Mount Music is the struggle between competing factions of modern Irish society for this Big House and the power and precedence of the Anglo-Irish that it symbolizes. That such a struggle existed at all is indicative of the relative fragility of the Anglo-

Irish position in modern Ireland at the turn of the century, but instead of placing the blame for this fragility on historical developments alone, the novel suggests that the reason was, as noted above, more internal than external. Whereas in earlier periods Mount Music’s Anglo-Irish inhabitants had been adept at negotiating competing cultural and economic demands, by the early twentieth century the discourse that had sustained their way of life was no longer able to address the demands being made of them. The family at Mount Music had to a great extent become obsolete as the center of power in their community, and the narrator illustrates this by drawing parallels between their demise and the extinction of the dinosaurs. So, for example, Colonel 116

Richard Talbot-Lowry, the patriarch of the family and the Talbot-Lowry most resistant to change, is often referred to as a “Plesiosauridae, or Pterodactyli” (MM11). Like the man in W.

B. Yeats’ poem “The Man Who Dreamed of Færyland,” with whom he is also compared,

Colonel Talbot-Lowry is shown wandering through life, deaf and blind to the meaning of the world around him, unaware that at every turn he misses an opportunity to understand what it is he seeks.62

But though Richard Talbot-Lowry is an important figure in the novel, for the most part the novel’s central human character is his youngest daughter, Christian Talbot-Lowry. In

Christian, Somerville and Ross created a very different heroine from their cool-headed, critical

Theo Sarsfield. Unlike Theo, Christian is an Irish insider, a passionate, Anglo-Irish woman whose personal characteristics in many ways parallel those of Lucas Malet’s Damaris. Christian is wholly at easy with experiences that are felt, but not easily expressed in language—the kinds of experiences Julia Kristeva would classify as registered in the semiotic. Because she understands the significance of such experiences and does not deny their existence, she has insight which allows her to communicate through physical and spiritual means with the natural world around her. Thus, her favorite playmates are the Mount Music hounds, and she is more at home with the inhabitants of the natural and supernatural worlds than she is with human society.

Since before she could speak “it was told of her eyes that they would quietly follow some visitor, invisible to others, but obvious to her,” and she was later known to have conversations with

“viewless confederates” (MM 11). Her sensitivity to the rhythms of the world around her give her an insight that can at times overstep the boundaries of time and place, and her inner distance from the power wrangling that underlies most human relationships in the novel gives her the

62 The authors’ use of the Yeats poem to clarify Colonel Talbot-Lowry’s type here is interesting since both women were opposed to any kind of alliance with the Literary Revival. The nod to Yeats is, nevertheless, in keeping with 117 ability to read all kinds of Irish endeavors with uncanny clarity. As the narrator explains, “for her spirit, the barriers and coverings that other spirits take to themselves wherewith to build hiding-places and shelters were of little avail. Motives and tendencies, the hidden forces that underlie action, were perceptible to her as are to the water-diviner the secret waters that bend and twist his hazel rod” (MM 217).

And yet, despite her occult abilities and sensitivity to the ebbs and tides of Irish country life—or perhaps because of them—Christian does not have an easy time negotiating a path through the various discourses that surround her. Whereas in An Irish Cousin Theo’s problem was her wish to fit what she saw to her preconceptions, in this novel it is everyone else trying to fit Christian to their preconceptions which causes her difficulties. Being able to see “with eyes that saw more” (MM 339) is not necessarily to her advantage in a society rife with political, social, and religious turmoil. Because such debates rarely have space, time, or patience for things known but unspeakable or unseen, Christian often remains unheard and unheeded, acted upon rather than controlling her own destiny. One result is that there are places in the novel where Christian is pushed to the sidelines of the action or is so thoroughly silenced that she seems to have no voice in what happens to her at all. So, for example, she simply obeys when her father “asserted his paternal rights, and had, following various classic and biblical precedents, sacrificed his daughter to his own particular formulae of religion and politics” (MM

283). And she sadly but resolutely accepts Larry’s anger and disdain when he cannot comprehend her motive for putting off their marriage. Both decisions are enormously painful and even torturous for Christian because she can envisage other choices to the ones being offered, but she cannot express herself in a way that would help either man see what she sees.

Martin’s assessment that Yeats “does write well I must say” (Letters 274). 118

From the first scene of the novel where she is being tortured by her brothers to the last scene at the deathbed of the Dr. Magnan, then, Christian has to assess and reassess how far she can allow herself to be boxed into identities constructed by others for her. Though there is a side of her that will forcefully resist the will of others when she considers that will unjust, she is not a rebel for rebellion’s sake and does what she feels is correct given the make-up of each unique circumstance. Christian’s situation is difficult because, unlike her middle-class, Catholic-Irish counterpart, Tishy Magnan, she is constrained by the social and behavioral expectations developed over the centuries by the Anglo-Irish. Where Tishy can take advantage of the greater mobility and personal freedom modern Irish society allows women of her class, Christian’s choices are limited by her family’s adherence to Anglo-Ireland’s antiquated behavioral expectations. She cannot, as Tishy does, simply run off with the man she loves because such an option is not and has never been part of her family’s vocabulary. But she can learn how to manage her personal sorrow when, as she visits the poor people of the surrounding countryside, she sees how those simple, Irish countryfolk accept their great personal tragedies as part of the hand that human life deals them. 63

One of the difficulties Christian must confront is how to negotiate the two most important debates of early twentieth-century Ireland: the essentially unbridgeable sectarian rift between

Catholic and Protestant Ireland and the burgeoning discourse of Irish national character.

Thought at first these seem to be kept on the peripheries of life at Mount Music, as the novel progresses, they become thoroughly invasive. The end result for Robert Talbot-Lowry is that they break his health and allow “his hereditary wallow in the Primeval Ooze . . . to be wrested

63 Philanthropic work such as visiting and ministering to the spiritual and physical needs of the estate’s poorer inhabitants was one of the tasks expected of the Big House ladies. It was one of the ways women could contribute to the good of the estate’s economy and a way for them to enlarge their sphere of influence in the nineteenth- century. 119 from him” (MM 311); and for a time it seems that the result will not be a great deal better for

Christian. Her opinion on these matters is easily drowned out by strident, impatient voices, and her clairvoyance and ardent, sensitive nature do not equip her to fight these combatants on their terms. But though at times she seems beaten into silence and submission by the speed and force with which these discourses overwhelm her, Christian is never completely changed by them.

Christian’s sense that these discourses are transient and essentially illusory allows her to weather their onslaughts with her core idea of herself intact. And, as the perennial middle-goer, the character who mediates between Protestant and Catholic Ireland, the Anglo-Irish past and future, and the semiotic and the symbolic, she actually voices some of the most important insights of the novel. When in a fit of passion Barty Magnan mistakenly implies that because of her class, Christian is a religious bigot, she answers “I don’t think I’m a religious bigot . . . but one never knows!” (MM 143). Though at that moment Christian is tickled to laughter by Barty’s less-than-Oxford pronunciation and simple adherence to Land Leaguer rhetoric, her answer is indicative of her insight. Bigots rarely understand themselves to be such, and in his desire to impress Christian, Barty had come perilously close to damning himself as one.

Even more remarkable is Christian’s assessment that the kind of social and political revolution being promoted by various political groups of the period might be “for the good of

Ireland” but was also “putting the cart before the horse” (MM 129). In her opinion, the real

“Spirit of the Nation” was not the romanticized love of freedom from oppression popular at the time. What made the Irish Irish in Christian’s view was their “Religious Intolerance,” and “the

Shan van Voght has got to free us from each other before she takes on England!” (MM 130).64

64 The Spirit of the Nation is the title of a compilation of nationalist verse and song published in 1843. It included the famous National Hymn by Gavan Duffy, “Fag a Beleac” or “Clear the Road” which became the unofficial hymn of the Young Ireland movement. The “Shan van Voght,” which means “the old woman of Ireland,” is a phrase repeated throughout the revolutionary song “The Wearing of the Green.” 120

Such opinions are, of course, not easy to align with the discourse of nationalism that consumes the male characters of the novel, but they are indicative of Christian’s ability to see past the limitations these discourses must create in order to define what they are and are not.

Throughout the novel Christian’s character is coupled with the old Protestant hymn

“Christian, Dost Thou See Them,” a sonorous, serious hymn. Initially, the hymn’s application to

Christian is clear: she does see “how the powers of darkness / compass [her] around” (3,4), and it is this ability that makes her the subject of her brother’s fanatical imaginary play.65 But, unlike the speaker of the hymn, Christian has to worry about many more dark powers than Satan’s dark spirits because, as the novel develops, every aspect of her life is threatened in some way.

Whether it is the attempt on her life by her father’s former tenant, her father’s insensitivity to her wishes regarding Larry, or Dr. Magnan’s wrangling to secure Mount Music from her family,

Christian’s well-being is constantly challenged by forces beyond her control. Because she is so thoroughly connected with Mount Music and its demesne, she is not privy to much of the wrangling that concerns her because it takes place outside the grounds. But the threat is always that she will suffer from its influence.

And yet, just as in the hymn there is the promise that “toil shall make thee / some day all mine own, / and the end of sorrow / shall be near my throne” (29-32), Christian’s long suffering does end well. Dr. Magnan is miraculously killed by a flash flood, Tishy runs off with her medical student, Barty reveals that he has no intention to act on his father’s claim on Mount

Music, and Christian’s parents flee to England where they hope to avoid the realities of modern

Ireland. All these occurrences clear the way for Christian to marry the man she loves. But this tidying up of otherwise unsolvable problems through miraculous means has been particularly

65 The full text and musical example from the hymn may be found at “Christian.” 121 annoying to many of Mount Music’s critics. Hillary Robinson concludes that “the complete lack of discipline and restraint reduces the novel to the banal” (165), and even Vera Kreilkamp concludes that “the author’s solution . . . suggests her unwillingness to face both the inevitable working out of her own plot—and of her nation’s historical process” (131). Both these critiques suggest that when Somerville and Ross reached the end of this novel, it was not quite where

Somerville had expected it to end. But given what we know about her ability as a writer and the resonance the old hymn has throughout the novel, it is possible that Somerville always intended an ending of this kind.66 It would perhaps a more fruitful to ask whether this ending is really so very positive.

As in An Irish Cousin, the last action of the story signals the resolution of a heretofore thwarted love—Larry turns around from paying his last respects to Dr. Magnan, then sees

Christian, and his love for her is reawakened. But also like An Irish Cousin, the novel does not quite end with this last, significant action. In Mount Music there is also a postscript, although this time it is in the form of an apology from the narrator who actually declares that the tale was written to give an English audience some idea of what Irish life was like. The narrator then goes on to claim that the tale “shall not be tidied-up, and rounded off, even though as much, nearly, remains unsaid, as would equal what has gone before” (MM 340). In other words, the final action of the novel is not meant to imply that all is as harmonious and peaceful as one might be tempted to expect. And there is good reason for this. Certainly the political and religious strife that has been such an important factor throughout the novel are anything but resolved, and Dr.

Magnan’s death does not mean that the mortgages on Mount Music have disappeared. But even more important is the question of how suited Larry and Christian really are for one another. The

66 Martin was, of course, dead by the time Somerville took up this project, but they had worked on sketches for the novel before Martin’s death. 122 old Gaelic, Mary Twomey, declares that Christian “was fond of him always! . . . And why wouldn’t she be fond of him? Sure the dog’d be fond of him” (MM 340), which is not the kind of compliment to give one confidence that all will be well. Larry has never listened well to what

Christian has to say, and given the suddenness of his illumination at the end of the novel, there is no reason to expect that much has changed.

So, despite its theatrical last moments, Mount Music, like An Irish Cousin ends on a note of uncertainty, leaving many threads still unraveled and raising as many questions as it answers.

Christian is still unable to express her insights on life in a way that will reach those who could most benefit from hearing them. Old Ireland as represented by her father is too ensconced in its traditional ways to consider her perspective, and New Ireland as represented by Larry Coppinger is too eager to listen to the manipulative flattery of others who would use it for their own ends.

The intelligent, thoughtful voice of the Anglo-Irish woman does not resonate in this Irish society, and Christian’s temporary triumph over the powers that compass her around rings hollow—if not so silently that it cannot be heard at all.

Sarah’s Youth (1938)

If Somerville and Ross had misgivings about the degree to which an Anglo-Irish woman could be heard during the years of the Troubles, by the time Edith Somerville came to compose their last novel, the situation clearly did not seem quite so dire. Sarah’s Youth was written during the 1930s when Edith Somerville was in her eighties and many of the political and social uncertainties that haunt the pages of Mount Music seemed at least temporarily or superficially resolved. Set in the late 1920s, Sarah’s Youth contains no sense of great foreboding or impending difficulties and instead focuses on the social confusions created by the decades of 123 civil unrest in Ireland. Sarah’s Youth is one of the few works published under the Somerville and Ross name which cannot be traced directly to materials gathered during Violet Martin’s lifetime. Hillary Robinson notes that Edith Somerville scoured their letters, diaries, and other materials for the subject of another novel as early as 1929, but it was not until 1936 that Edith

Somerville mentioned in a letter that she was actually working on one (Robinson 200). Its writing took place at Drishane,67 and though it was interrupted by the tragic murder of her brother Admiral Boyle Somerville, recurring illnesses, and a trip to America on horse business,68 it took only slightly longer than a year to write.

Like many of Somerville and Ross’s later works, Sarah’s Youth has not received a great deal of critical attention, and when it is discussed, it is usually dismissed as an entertaining, but minor, work. Hillary Robinson considers it “extremely readable,” but she sees its real importance in the way it puts “the far greater novels into perspective, and by doing so help[s] us to see them more clearly” (203). John Cronin is much less generous and considers it a work in which “the octogenarian author trots forth with a good deal of brio all the hobby-horses on which her weaker fiction depends” (92). Though this latter criticism smacks of ageism, both critics do appreciate the novel’s energy and verve and draw attention to its spirited view of Sarah Heritage-

Dixon’s struggle to find a place for herself in Irish society of the early twentieth century. Unlike

Mount Music, the novel does not directly address many of the social or political hot potatoes of modern Ireland, but if one looks closer, its connection to Mount Music is indisputable.

67 Edith Somerville and her sister, Hildegarde, continually found creative ways to maintain their ancestral home. At various times they ran a dairy and a violet farm, and they bred cattle, hounds, and horses—all in an attempt to keep their family home. In 1942 at the death of their brother Cameron, it passed into the hands of her nephew Desmond, but it was not until 1946, when she was 88 years old, that she had to leave it. 68 Admiral Somerville was assassinated in his own home on March 24th 1936. Though no one ever claimed responsibility for the crime, Edith Somerville was certain that the reason for his murder was political. Over the years, Admiral Somerville had written about sixty recommendations for Irish youth who wished to enter the British navy. This was construed as a kind of treachery by certain nationalist fanatics. 124

In interesting and rather remarkable ways, Sarah’s Youth returns us to the essential questions faced by Irish women in Mount Music. But instead of continuing Christian’s story, it turns to the question of what would have happened if Dr. Magnan and his wife had not been thwarted in their efforts to climb out of the professional middle-class and into the realm of the

Anglo-Irish gentry. What would have happened to Tishy Magnan if she had married Larry

Coppinger, and how would her life—or the life of her daughter—have been changed by her family’s forced entry into the class which had so long been the provenance of the Anglo-Irish?

The possible path of the unmarried Anglo-Irish woman who stayed in Ireland through the

Troubles and into the early years of the republic is also addressed through the character of Miss.

Mary Lorimer, the “Big Lady” of Castle Ower. In this novel the Anglo-Irish woman has a clear sense of her place in the schema of Irish society, while the woman of mixed class heritage is on much shakier ground. Like Tishy Magnan, Sarah Heritage-Dixon is encouraged to take advantage of the new freedoms created by the recent social and political upheavals in Ireland, and it is her unsteady journey into the realm of Anglo-Irish respectability which forms the greater part of the novel’s action.

Perhaps the biggest change in the Irish society of Sarah’s Youth is that it is no longer bossed and controlled by men of narrow vision. Instead, it is controlled by women, some of whom have great ability, and all of whom have greater foresight than the men they manipulate and dominate with skill and tact. Sarah’s father, Captain Thomas Heritage, is the most typical example of this system. He is described as “a fairly typical member of that respectable Anglo-

Irish middle-class which is law-abiding, kindly, and mainly Protestant” (Sarah’s Youth 7), but he is not a member of the Anglo-Irish class or even a landowner because of primogeniture. Instead, he owes his position as master of Shruell House to the machinations and financial backing of his 125 ambitious mother. Captain Tom’s mother, who is ironically named Mrs. Heritage, is from the newly mobile Irish mercantile class. She is “the well-endowed daughter of a comfortably prosperous butter merchant” (SY 7) who married a short-lived Dublin doctor and because of her money has undisguised pretensions to gentility. It is she who refuses to make Tom a

“professional man” and inspires instead his passage through the British military machine and his service in the Boer War. And it is she who manipulates his marriage to another short-lived but materially well-endowed Anglo-Irish spouse, Wilhelmina Dixon.

Minnie Dixon is landed gentry by birth, but she has inherited the Shruell estate more by default than by right. Her two handsome, older brothers, Gervase and Billy, to whom the estate should have gone according to the laws of primogeniture had died young—“having, it may be presumed, each drunk the cross off an available ass” (SY 12). At the death of their father,

Minnie is left sole heiress of a substantial estate, and though she is at first “resolved to keep the freedom so lately come to her,” she “found something in Tommy’s blue eyes (in spite of pink edges and that undoubted cast) that appealed to her” (SY 18). She is described as a meek women who has had her spirit broken by “thirty-three years of bondage and bullying” by her brothers and father (SY 17). And yet, when she marries Captain Tom, she does something surprising— she makes certain that, in the event of her death her fortune and her property are passed on to her child rather than to her husband.

Since the 1870s Irish women had legally been able to retain control of their own property after marriage, but it took another century of bitter struggle before they received equal protection from many kinds of domestic and institutionalized abuse under the law. So, for example, it was not until 1967 that women were protected against being disinherited by a husband’s will and left 126 homeless (Scannell 73).69 And it is one of the many ironies of this story that just such a situation develops when Minnie Dixon dies—but with the gender roles reversed. Minnie does not immediately make her husband homeless because she does allow him to remain living at Schrull

House during his lifetime, but she does ensure that none of the Dixon property reverts to him or his offspring from his second marriage. Thus, Captain Tom does not become landed gentry, a fact which has some important consequences for him and his family’s position in Lismanus society.

The figures of power in this society are women, the daughters of Colonel Lorimer, who is the second son of an Anglo-Irish family that has owned Castle Ower, the area’s largest estate, for centuries. Like Captain and Mrs. Minnie Heritage, Colonel Lorimer and his family live at the family seat by default rather than right. The real owner is Colonel Lorimer’s older brother, Lord

Mountmanus, a man who “never married, and was living a calm and peaceful life in the South of

France” (SY 63). Because he has no interest in living in Ireland, he is only too glad that his brother “take[s] over what his Lordship was pleased to call ‘the whole damned Irish box and dice’” (SY 63). Colonel Lorimer’s four daughters have been brought up at Castle Ower according to the dictates of Anglo-Irish gentility, but their father’s opinion that “girls were married for looks and not for brains” has meant their education has come from a series of governesses rather than expensive continental finishing schools. Nevertheless, the narrator describes them as having “a mixed yet not inadequate culture” (SY 64), and throughout the novel, it is they who hold the positions of highest respect and honor in Lismanus society.

69 It is possible that in creating a similar scenario for Minnie Dixon and Captain Tom—but reversing gender roles— Edith Somerville was commenting on the inequities of the Irish Constitution created by the De Valera government. As Yvonne Scannell notes, despite its “adulation of marriage and motherhood” the De Valera Constitution was framed “to keep women in the home by foul rather than fair means” (Scannell 73). It did little to change legislation which for centuries had allowed Irish men to think of their wives as property rather than equal partners and continued to assume “that the normal vocation of women was in marriage, motherhood and the home” (Scannell 72). 127

Most important of these Lorimer women to the community, though, is Miss. Mary, who like Christian is the youngest daughter of a large Anglo-Irish family and attuned to the rhythms of nature. But here the similarities end. Miss. Mary is not fey, she is physically energetic, she is unmarried, and she is the undisputed “Master” of the Castle Ower hunt. Her social position is certainly unusual for such a tradition-laden society, but the narrator makes it clear that it is Miss.

Mary’s special circumstances and abilities that allow her to elide local gender expectations.

Miss. Mary’s betrothed was “killed in a point-to-point, a thoroughly creditable death, the country considered” (SY 65), and her abilities as a horse-woman and Master of the Ower hounds put her in a place beyond social criticism or even comment. “The Big Lady,” as she is known, is

Amazonian in stature—“a good six feet high and rode something over fourteen stone” (SY 65)— and her combination of physical strength and mental acuteness makes her “every bit as good to

[Colonel Lorimer] as a son itself” (SY 65). Miss. Mary is an amazingly powerful figure, a woman whose unusual circumstances have allowed her to develop both the sensitivity usually attributed to women and the commanding personality usually attributed to men. It is she who dominates and controls the lives of men and women in Lismanus, and it is she who becomes

Sarah Heritage-Dixon’s most important mentor and ally.

Thus, Sarah Heritage-Dixon grows up in a society where men’s power is to a large extent token and women have taken on roles traditionally played by men because the men have for various reasons abdicated their traditional responsibilities. The few Anglo-Irish men who have significant roles in the novel, such as Captain Tom and Sarah’s Uncle Robert, are no match for the strength of character and will of the female characters. And it becomes clear that the tactics of patriarchal culture that had kept Christian under control in Mount Music no longer have the potency to completely contain modern Irish women. Like Robert Talbot-Lowry, 128

Captain Tom promises his daughter to an unsuitable and unscrupulous suitor, but Sarah simply refuses him. Like Dr. Magnan, Uncle Robert schemes to entrap Sarah into marriage through the creation of a web of dubious financial dealings with her father, but in this novel he fails because

Sarah does not accept the burden of these dealings. Only the Gaelic-Irish son of the blacksmith,

Tim Kavanagh, receives any real respect from the women in the novel, and this is due to his talent with animals—which all and sundry admire—and his resolute lack of interest in the scheming and power play that trip up the men of the middle classes. Like Christian, Tim

Kavanagh lives in harmony with both semiotic and symbolic experience. He has only to touch an animal or be near Sarah in order for calm and healing to occur, and yet he is also able to negotiate language well enough to go to veterinary school in Dublin. But, like Christian, Tim is essentially content to live with the world as it comes to him. He does not want or expect any more than what he is given or can earn with his own talents, and he accepts the women as his equals and superiors—never his inferiors.

For Sarah, then, the experience of growing up is not fraught with the very real and oppressive dangers that force Christian to do what is so painful—give up her own desires in order to ensure the well-being of others. And, given Sarah’s character, it is not likely that she would ever have thought of having to do so. Although bland Tommy Heritage is her father,

Sarah has nothing in common with him and is always connected to the Dixon side of her heritage. She has the “dark good looks of the Dixons,” their grey eyes and “straight black brows,” and her “wild Dixon blood” means she has a temper that “did not belie her Dixon breeding” (SY 32). As she rushes headlong into life, Sarah does not accept distress as any part of her lot, and every attempt to corral or outwit her by intellect or force is doomed to failure. 129

Like the spirited horses she loves to ride, Sarah can only be persuaded to do what others wish for short periods before her skittish nature reasserts itself and she bucks free of all constraints.

Sarah’s exuberant, willful character is presented as a representative kind of Irishness, one that differs so fundamentally from English expectations that members of the two cultures can only live in a state of constant misunderstanding and conflict. At one point Sarah’s father ships her off to boarding school in England in order to “tame” her, but she lived in such “an atmosphere of chronic war, sometimes open and declared, always threatening” that she was dubbed “Battling Sarah” by her English schoolmates (SY 57-58). Eventually she managed to cause so much ruckus that she was sent home to Ireland, where she was “very happy, the thought of past sufferings soothed by remembrance of how, seated serene in her departing taxi, she had passed the School Crocodile, and of how, thrusting her head out of the window, she had put out her tongue continuously at the Crocodile” (SY 60). Her dislike of the English and their ways is only increased during a later visit to London with Miss. Mary. At a lunch where Sarah feels

“like a small dog in the middle of a pack of hounds,” she gradually restores her sense of equilibrium by thinking that “this was enemy country” (SY 263-264). The narrator notes that as the women marvel at “the orthodox Irish color” of her eyes and her “perfect set of teeth,” they

“might have been justified in keeping an apprehensive eye on the carving-knives” if they had known of the “mingled contempt and hatred that seethed in Sarah’s rebel mind” (SY 265). Sarah

Heritage-Dixon has nothing in common with the English people of her class, and she clearly has no wish to.

Because Sarah is so very rambunctious, she is not at all sensitive to the nuances of semiotic experiences or even aware of their potency. So, for example, she is completely unaware that her mother’s spirit is shadowing her every move, and her constant falls from her horses are 130 indicative of her inability to communicate with them. Her bullheadedness also means that she often falls victim to the vagaries of emotion because if she cannot immediately control her situation, she simply grabs at the nearest option and insists that it work—even if it is completely inappropriate to the task. In an earlier era, this might have meant that she would, like her uncles, eventually have destroyed herself through her excesses, but in this novel she is much luckier.

Instead of being alone and slowly chastened by her experiences in the world, Sarah finds herself guided carefully through the various morasses that open up before her by women from both this world and the next. Through her half-sister Kathleen, who is said to have “a quality of refinement and remoteness that had no counterpart in the kindly, common, and commonplace

[Heritage] family” (SY 219), she receives messages and warnings from her dead mother’s spirit.

Though Sarah does not always listen to these messages, Kathleen’s own good sense manages to smooth over Sarah’s rocky path on more than one occasion.

Even more important to Sarah’s development is the master/pupil relationship she develops with Miss. Mary. As this relationship flourishes, the latter finds ways to carefully guide Sarah’s choices by removing her—physically, mentally, and emotionally—when dangers threaten. In addition, she encourages Sarah to take paths not usually taken by young women of her nationality and class and shows her that the world consists of a great deal more than

Lismanus. So, for example, when Sarah gets it into her head that she loves and wants to marry

Tim Kavanah and Cousin Richard is scheming how to trick her into marrying him, Miss. Mary spirits Sarah off to England for a visit, removing Sarah from immediate danger and exposing her to a whole realm of other possibilities for living. When Sarah does return to Lismanus, it is with

“newly opened eyes” and “newly instructed ears” (SY 219), as well as an ability to see beyond the set of behaviors even she thought were inevitable. As this powerful female mentor network 131 gathers around Sarah, it makes it increasingly easy for her to sidestep the path expected of young women in Western society for centuries—marriage and motherhood—and become something more suited to her gifts.

Sarah Heritage-Dixon’s experiences in Sarah’s Youth are, to a great extent, decisive for her future, but they are not the kinds of experiences to which she will refer all her life. They are more like the removal of some clutter before she can begin her real quest, and by the end of the novel she is content to let what has passed remain in the past and looks forward to a life of her own willing. Sarah decides that “marriage is out of my line and I love hounds,” so she asks

Miss. Mary if she can become the latter’s whip and kennel woman (SY 310). Such an option would never have existed for Christian Talbot-Lowry or Theo Sarsfield, but in the female economy of this novel, women are not bound by the rules of patriarchal Western culture. Men like Captain Heritage may fume, “it was the women began it—I had no hand in it at all—the women had it all arranged without a word to me, good or bad!” (SY 243), but it is no longer they who have complete control over what the women they breed can and cannot do.

In many ways Sarah’s Youth is wonderfully and unrepentantly fantastic. It asserts that, after so many centuries of institutionalized oppression, modern Irish women have finally found a way around the discourses created to contain them. They can use their female alliances to outmaneuver and outwit even the most tenacious male foe, and their options are as wide as the world is large. Although, as noted earlier, the roles women were expected to play in the new

Ireland were certainly circumscribed by the biases of the Constitution’s writers, Irish women’s lives were indelibly changed by the enormous social upheavals of the early twentieth century.

Gifford Lewis notes that in the years surrounding World War I, “a number of women in Edith’s and Martin’s immediate circle” became respected doctors, engineers, and social theorists 132

(Somerville 228), and it is worth remembering that for some sixty years, from 1889 to 1949,

Edith Somerville and Violet Martin were professional writers who between them published twenty-nine book-length works and an innumerable number of smaller articles and stories. To

Edith Somerville, life for women in Ireland must have seemed better than it had ever been during her lifetime, and it is, I believe, to women’s limitless possibility and hope for the future that

Sarah’s Youth finally points us.

“Sure ye’re always laughing!”

Like their English contemporary, Lucas Malet, Somerville and Ross have been difficult to align with the structuring discourses of the culture they inhabited, but unlike Malet, this has not meant their gradual erasure from the literary canon. Somerville and Ross’s status as Anglo-

Irish writers has, as noted earlier, placed them in the odd position of periodically falling out of political favor, but they have never quite fallen out of public notice. Their The Real Charlotte has continued to be well regarded as a work which has “the power to haunt the mind in ways that seem out of proportion to its easy, middle-brow charm” (Kiberd 72), and their Irish R.M. series continues to have a vigorous life—in its book form, as a PBS series, and more recently as the focus of a number of interesting academic articles.70 But in recent years the “problem” of their

Anglo-Irishness has tended to outweigh most other concerns for their critics, and this has, I believe, been to our detriment. This is not to say that the issue of Anglo-Irish participation in

Irish culture at the turn of the century is not of enormous importance in their work, but it should be regarded as only one of many issues tackled by these vigorous thinkers.

70 It is interesting that, where prior to the 1990s there was very little scholarly interest in the Irish R.M. stories, since 1992 articles about them have appeared regularly in scholarly journals such Notes on Modern Irish Literature and The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. Many of these articles take up the theme of fox hunting and its political 133

Of the novels in this study, An Irish Cousin has received the most critical attention— largely because of its position as the firstborn and the fact that its gothic representation of a Big

House in need of redemption suggests a reason for the decline of the Anglo-Irish caste itself.

Vera Kreilkamp’s recent work with Mount Music is part of the revival of interest in Big House literature, but no one has ever had very much to say about Sarah’s Youth. This is strange because, even though the ever-energetic Edith Somerville published three collections of essays and miscellanea after Sarah’s Youth—Notions In Garrison ( 1941), Happy Days (1946), and

Maria, & Some Other Dogs (1949)—it is in this novel that we have the last extensive comment by Somerville and Ross on the place of Irish women in Ireland’s changing culture. All three novels are clearly concerned with the contributions women can make to other women’s lives in

Irish culture. Theo Sarsfield’s wish to appropriate Irish culture for her own purposes haunts an increasingly isolated Christian Talbot-Lowry’s commentary on the nature of Irish national character. The silence forced upon Anglo-Irish women like Christian by the competing discourses of the nationalist struggle is shown to be eventually vanquished by the strength and purpose of capable Irish women like Miss. Mary Lorimer. And because of this, young women like Sarah Heritage-Dixon can look forward to their future with confidence and the certainty that they will be able to have a say in their own destiny.

One of the hallmarks of Somerville and Ross criticism is the celebration of their humor, and it would not be an exaggeration to claim that the word which appears most often in writing about their lives and work is “rollicking.” There is certainly good reason for this. Much of their writing abounds with good humor and the kind of good-natured ribbing which asks us to enjoy, accept, and question the reasons for the quirkiness of all kinds of human behavior. But this does

implications (see Chen), but others are concerned with the relationship between comedy and representations of the Irish (see Cahalan and Paul Deane). 134 not mean that all of their work is humorous or that what they had to say was simple. In An Irish

Cousin, Mount Music, and Sarah’s Youth there are some humorous elements—especially in the tone of the latter—but on the whole, these are works in which irony is meant to make us think about the serious, life-changing issues that Anglo-Irish women faced during the high Imperial period. It is not comic that the Anglo-Irish community Theo Sarsfield enters is in need of redemption; it is not comic that Christian Talbot-Lowry cannot be heard; and it is not comic that the Anglo-Irish men of Sarah’s Youth are emasculated, impotent, and vain. But in each case, the people concerned are saved to some extent by a resilience and vigor that may surprise them, and is, perhaps the hallmark of the Irish people themselves. Somerville and Ross are infectiously positive. Their wonder at the complexity of the human spirit and their love of all that people can be can still move us to tears and laughter. And in many ways we should be thankful that they can still teach us to appreciate such sentiments as that of the old beggar-woman in Sikbbeen who once sent Violet Martin on her way with the benediction: “Sure ye’re always laughing! That ye may laugh in the sight of the Glory of Heaven!” (qtd. in Lewis, Somerville 230). 135

Chapter 4.

An Australian Heroine: Rosa Praed Campbell.

There can be no doubt that the struggle to define Irish national identity influenced the ways Somerville and Ross’s work was received by its audiences, but during the period 1880-

1940 such influences were not unique to Ireland. Just as Britain’s “first overseas colony”71 was contemplating ways to define itself anew, so was one of its most distant overseas colonies—

Australia. On January 1st, 1901, the Australian colonies were federated to create the

Commonwealth of Australia, and, as in Ireland, the political struggle was accompanied by a cultural one that gradually became drawn along gendered lines. The contributions male and female Australian writers made to the national literature during this period tended to have very different foci. But if anyone knew what it meant to live the life of an Australian bush pioneer and addressed what that life meant to the development of a particularly Australian identity, it was

Rosa Praed Campbell. During her long life, Rosa Praed would travel from the world of the

Australian backblocks to the centers of European culture and politics. She would learn to move with grace throughout the social strata in Britain and Australia, and she wrote about all manner of social, cultural, and spiritual issues. But always in her writing one can detect the residue of her experiences as a child and young woman on the Australian colonial frontier. For Praed, the

Australian colonial adventure was underlain by as many untold terrors as it was with glories, and this has a great deal to do with the ways Australia had figured in the European imagination for centuries.

71 This is Edward Said’s formulation from his essay “Yeats and Decolonization” in Culture and Imperialism, but it is a stance the contemporary Irish critic Julian Moynahan vigorously opposes. As Moynahan notes, “one cannot really argue with Said, for he knows too little of Ireland, especially about the history of its entanglements with the larger island, to provide a basis for argument. To regard the few nautical miles separating Britain and Ireland ‘overseas’ is 136

Removing the Dreadful Banditti

In 1826, the future Australian statesman William Charles Wentworth submitted his poem

“Australasia” for the annual Poetry Prize at Cambridge University. Though it was not to win the competition, it expressed some surprisingly radical ideas about the relationship between Britain and its Australian offspring: 72

And, oh Britannia! shouldst thou cease to ride

Despotic Empress of old Ocean’s tide;— [. . .]

Should e’er arrive that dark disastrous hour,

When bow’d by luxury, thou yield’st to pow’r;—[. . .]

May this, thy last-born infant,—then arise,

To glad thy heart, and greet thy parent eyes:

And Australasia float, with flag unfurled,

A new Britannia in another world! (28,29, 32,33, 38-41)

Clearly Wentworth envisioned Australia as a lively but ultimately obedient child of Empire, one that would be able to bear the burden of being British when Britain herself could not. And though such noble ambition in an offspring would probably be encouraged by most parents, it is rather surprising given the circumstances that brought the Australian colonies into being.

The British colonies in Australia were not, as they were in Ireland, the result of an ancient and concerted effort to colonize a rowdy but potentially remunerative neighbor. Instead, they were afterthoughts, hastily conceived imperial catchall settlements situated on the other side of the earth whose initial purpose was to house the many human byproducts of England’s

an illustration. Substantial portions of western Scotland lie farther from the British mainland than does Ireland” (xii). 72 In recent years the poem has become rather notorious for its pro-British sentiments expressed in heroic couplets. What many critics overlook in their critique of the poem, however, are the constant references to Britain’s eventual 137 development into a modern, industrialized nation.73 The enormous distance that separated

Australia from Europe coupled with the land’s own incredible vastness, strangeness, and difficulty might, under other circumstances, have been to its detriment. But these qualities and the fact that its indigenous peoples were completely unable to counter the encroachment of modern Europeans proved to be exactly what was needed by a nation in search of a prison.

During the eighteenth century a series of challenges to the social fabric, including an increase in capitalist practices and the development of the global economy, produced upheavals on every level of British society. As the old ways were replaced by the needs and expectations of an industrializing society, many British subjects found themselves adrift, both socially and economically, and the judicial system sought to control the resulting rise in crime through the implementation of increasingly punitive measures. At the time, conventional wisdom did not necessarily connect the rise in criminal behavior to the broader economic and social issues; it considered it due to an increase in the number of people born into the “criminal class,” a group into which Georgian and, later, Victorian authorities lumped those involved in revolutionary actions as well as criminal ones (Hughes 24). This conflation of crime with the threat of revolution led to a sense of impending disaster if something were not done to remove the criminal class and their “infectious distempers” from converse with the rest of Britain’s population.

Because the convict crisis in England had become so acute by 1786, the Pitt government finally sanctioned an idea it had previously been reluctant to accept: the development of a penal

but certain decline as a world power. Such ideas would have irked Home governments even decades later—let alone at a time when transportation was in full swing and the imperial star apparently on the rise. 73 Some Australian historians, such as Alan Frost, have also proposed that the reason for the development of the colonies in Australia was as a deterrent to French aspirations in the Pacific. But, the formal proposal for colonization presented to Parliament in 1786, the “Heads of a Plan for effectually disposing of convicts,” clearly confirms that the principle purpose of the colonies was “as a remedy for the evils likely to result from the late alarming and numerous increase of felons in [Britain]” (qtd. in Hughes 66). 138 settlement on the distant continent of Australia. When the First Fleet sailed for Botany Bay in

1787, it carried the first of thousands of “Dreadful banditti” (qtd. in Hughes 66) whose transportation was meant to satisfy a general wish of the British ruling classes to “not only get rid of the ‘criminal class’ but if possible to forget about it” (Hughes 1). That such forgetfulness was actually impossible would be something the British public eventually had to contend with, but it was a potent fantasy and one that guaranteed that even after transportation was abolished, the Australian colonies remained havens for Britain’s black sheep, laterborn sons, and imperial misfits of all kinds.

The legacy of these less-than-auspicious beginnings was encapsulated in the idea of the

“Convict Stain,” an invisible but supposedly indelible hereditary flaw which was to darken the social aspirations of Australians in Britain and Australia for decades. As Robert Hughes has noted, it was “part of English attitudes to Australians before 1960, and especially before World

War II,” and for decades after the cessation of transportation, upper middle-class Australians in

Britain were wont to cringe at “languid sneers directed at [a supposed] criminal ancestry” (158).

In important ways, the “Stain” was thought to function like the blood on Bluebeard’s keys— when discovered, it signaled the immediate presence of a possible transgressor, and it simultaneously revealed a sometimes real and sometimes imagined hidden shame. Such an idea would not have been possible without the underlying assumption that criminality is an inborn trait that, like an incurable disease, is a distinct entity, separate from a pure and healthy body to which it needs to adhere in order to flourish. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, the conflation of criminality with certain class behaviors was particularly useful for British society because it enabled and sanctioned the “amputation” of potentially threatening individuals from the social body (Hughes 596). But even more importantly, it would encourage Britons and 139

Australians alike to think of their various homelands for generations in terms of intrinsic health and/or disease.

Soon after the first colonies were established, Australia’s role as a dumping ground for undesirables was coupled with its role as a place of possibility for those who had trouble succeeding in the British social system at Home, and both these roles were logical extensions of ancient fantasies about the “Great South Land.” For millennia, ideas about the Terra Australis

Incognita thought to exist somewhere in the great southern oceans had inspired creative endeavors and fears of all kinds. Ptolemy considered its existence a physical necessity—without it the Earth would unbalance under the weight of the known European and Near Eastern landmasses—and it was thought to be inhabited by the Antipodes, beings who walked on their hands and shaded their eyes from the sun with feet turned to act like umbrellas. Ancient

European notions eventually mixed with Chinese, Muslim, and Hindu ideas about the cosmological connection between the unknown lands to the south and the ends of the Earth, so that the Terra Incognita was thought to contain fiery kingdoms inhabited by warrior women and house great abysses into which the oceans of the world drained.74 By the 1880s, most utopian fantasies about the “Great South Land” had been demolished as it was found to be “much smaller than anticipated, occupied by ‘savages’ that were not as noble to the European eye as those of

America or Polynesia, [and it offered] no succor to men hungry for [rivers of ] gold, thirsty for sylvan glades, or desperate for lost souls to convert” (“MythOz”). But these practical frustrations did not necessarily diminish Australia’s ability to inspire all kinds of fantastic ideas, fears, and actions.

74 The connections between European and Asian speculations about the “Great South Land” is studied in some detail by the Australian historian, Manning Clark. It is interesting that they continued to inspire the fantasies of writers on many continents throughout the nineteenth century, including Edgar Allen Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. 140

As a land mass, the Australian continent was given a final outline after Matthew Flinders’ circumnavigation and mapping in 1802-1804, and yet, the harshness and unfamiliarity of the land ensured that great swaths of its inner space remained uncharted and relatively unknown to

Europeans until the end of the nineteenth century. This enabled explorers, colonizers, and politicians alike to think of these inner reaches as terra nullius, empty space they could occupy without having to worry about the claims of prior inhabitants.75 As an added bonus, they could pour all manner of residual matter and energies into this “emptiness” without having to attend to the checks and balances of civilization. The assumption of terra nullius did not, of course, annul the reality that Australia was not actually empty or full of nothing. There were prior human occupants of the land with whom colonists and governments had to contend, and the space proved to be quite crowded with hazards that tested the mettle of men, women, and children alike. Nevertheless, terra nullius was a powerful idea that, like most fantasies, simplified what might otherwise have proven overwhelming. It enabled generations of pioneers to embark on what for some were successful, others foolhardy, and still others indifferent ventures, but it would eventually extract its cost. The ghosts of that which had been periodically jettisoned from one generation’s consciousness in order for terra nullius to function would eventually return with a vengeance to haunt many later efforts to define the uniquely Australian nature of both the nation and the individuals who allied themselves with it.

75 After an initial period during which British authorities shielded the Australian aboriginal peoples from violence, the government and settlers readily adopted the notion that the aboriginal peoples were—like the Native Americans in the United States—members of a dying race which would inevitably disappear from the face of the earth because of its inability to adapt to the demands of modern society. In many instances this attitude was used to justify the 141

Whose Abject is it Anyway?

Though I use the term “ghosts” here to describe aspects of Australian experience which otherwise might remain ineffable, what I am really referring to is what Julia Kristeva calls the

“abject.” The abject is that which is essential to human existence, but which a subject must attempt to jettison in order to consolidate subjectivity because it is incompatible with subjectivity and meaning. Neither subject nor object, the abject is not “my correlative, which, providing me with someone or something else as support, would allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous” (Kristeva, Powers 1). It is, therefore, not an “other” which might allow a subject to be “ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it.” But it does exist as a constant threat to subjectivity because its one quality is that it is “opposed to I” (Kristeva, Powers 1-2). The abject can only be recognized through what it does—which is to provoke abjection—and Kristeva roots

“the twisted braids of affects and thought I call by such a name” in the instinctual dyadic relationship of mother and child, a relationship which must be broken—usually with some degree of violence—in order for the creation of an autonomous subject to take place. And, just as the mother/child relationship is eventually revealed to have been fraught with difficulty from the first, so is the abject because existence demands a “recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded” (Kristeva, Powers 5).

One important characteristic of the abject is that because it cannot be either subject or object, it cannot be named. Though there is no doubt that it exists because its effects are felt and known, the abject and abjection can only be expressed through metaphor or simile. Kristeva likens the abject to the skin on the surface of milk, dung, or a corpse, objects whose existence signal a border between “the place where I am not and [that] which permits me to be” (Kristeva,

wholesale genocide that actually did produce the disappearance of all aboriginal communities in Tasmania and most traditional communities on the mainland. 142

Powers 3). But in more abstract terms it is also “a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles” and “any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law” (Powers 4). John Lechte likens the abject to “the dark side of narcissism; it is precisely what Narcissus would not want to have seen as he gazed into his pool” (160). And Anne-Marie Smith calls abjection “disgust which is a bodily form of revolt or . . . a phobic reaction against the polarized experiences of fusion and separation” (29). Like the semiotic, the abject is a pivotal concept in Kristeva’s theory of individuation. It gives a name to an aspect of human experience which has its roots in pre-oedipal experience, a realm of study both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories address, but to a far less nuanced degree.76

What counts as the dark, unpalatable, ambiguous abject is, of course, particular to a specific subject, but it is a useful concept when thinking about the Australian experience of the period 1880-1935. As noted earlier, the Australian colonies were originally conceived as places to which British society could banish its undesirable elements and, at least in theory, thus cleanse itself of its shady criminality. In other words, the Australian colonies were an attempt to both give the British nation’s abject a subjectivity and create a form of containment for it. In his copious study of the convict era in Australia, The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes speaks of this endeavor as an effort to “sublimate” what British society considered undesirable in itself (582), but the term—as used by Hughes—suggests that there was some kind of choice in the matter.

The abject, in contrast, exists as an ever-present, unpredictable, and to a significant degree ultimately uncontrollable threat. There is still little consensus among historians about whether

Britain’s convict experiment in Australia succeeded, but, because of the slippery nature of the

76 Interestingly, since the early 1980s Kristeva herself rarely used this terminology in her own theoretical work. Instead, she has preferred to express her ideas in the language of classical psychoanalysis or by using terminology from the Western philosophic and literary traditions. This change in strategy does not, however, mean that she has 143 abject, it was always doomed to fail as a method for controlling that which British society preferred was “not I.”

Nevertheless, the idea, the fantasy that a nation could give its abject a subjectivity and a place to which that abject could be banished, had discernable, real consequences for members of both communities. There were, after all, convict settlements filled with British subjects who had family, friends, and acquaintances back in Britain, and there were children born in a place where the unimaginable was assigned a face—though perhaps not the face that agreed with their own sense of what the abject might be. Perhaps not surprisingly, the complexity, indeterminacy, but palpable existence of the abject was to have a profound effect on the way Australians and Britons viewed themselves, their relationships to each other, and the places they inhabited. And this was especially true of the era 1880-1940 when Australia’s political independence from Britain led to the gradual renegotiation of national and personal identities.

What I would like to emphasize here is that even as the Australian colonies moved from being primarily human dumping grounds, sitting precariously on the edges of a vast and largely unexplored space, to a federation of states called the Commonwealth of Australia, the fear of that which could never really be transformed by symbolism—or civilization—remained a constant and potent force. In 1868 the last convict shipment arrived in Western Australia, and in the

Eastern states where transportation had ceased some decades before the power of “the convict stain” to influence lives had been gradually but surely diluted. The disappearance of the convicts was certainly welcomed by those who now preferred to see Australia as a place of possibility, the terra nullius they could transform to suit their desires. But, the peculiarly truculent nature of the

Australian landscape and climate, plus the fact that the vast spaces of the Australian interior

repudiated her own concepts since they do appear periodically and often unexpectedly—much like the elements of experience they are intended to allude to. 144

“conveniently concealed or obscured continual violations of practices and values the rest of the country held dear” (Kennedy 5), encouraged the transference of the fear and loathing of the abject onto another largely indeterminate, but certainly tangible object: the Australian “bush.”

The Bush and the Maiden

In her influential and controversial 1989 study, Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition, Kay Schaffer argues that since the 1890s Australian cultural identity has been structured according to a code of meaning which denies value to those cultural elements designated “feminine.” At the center of Schaffer’s argument is the assumption that the feminine is set up as a shadowy second-best to the “real,” Australian type, a fictional, male figure first developed in the writing of nationalist writers such as Henry Lawson, A. B. Patterson, and Joseph Furphy and later promoted by artists, politicians, and businessmen alike.77 If this

“real” Australian were to exist, he would be a working-class, white man, preferably one who lives in the bush and is “unpretentious, shy of women, a good mate and a battler” (Schaffer 8).

His reticence to form strong, emotional bonds with women, his distrust of authority, and the unbridled stoicism and courage he brings to his battles with life are thought to be a legacy of the real Australian’s humble, yet honest beginnings. Though the “type” is essentially an imaginary construct, his repeated reincarnation in Australian nationalist and popular culture has led to his existence being taken for granted. Schaffer’s argument is that the unrepentantly masculine bias in the construction of the Australian “type” has led to the rather shameless devaluation and conflation of those elements against which he defines himself: women, the landscape, and the urban elite. The devaluation of these elements is not, of course, unique to Australian culture, but 145 what makes the Australian nationalist perspective different from most other imperial perspectives is the way in which women are conflated with the harsh, recalcitrant, mysteriously threatening nature of the Australian bush (Schaffer 14).

The “bush” in Australian parlance almost always signifies a forested space which has fuzzy, rather indeterminable boundaries. It lies largely outside of Anglo-Australians’ control and is at best benignly mysterious and at worst absolutely terrifying. Like the abject, the bush inspires reaction, but it, too, can never be completely contained or restrained by human intervention. It can only be erased from experience for a time. Richard Phillips notes that even though by the end of the nineteenth century, maps of the Australian interior were “crammed with

[surveyed] detail,” the idea that Australia was primarily made up of hostile, unknowable, unexplored bush was a commonplace in the Australian popular and literary imaginations (78).

Western culture’s tendency to think of the natural world in feminine terms, as Mother Nature,

Mother Earth etc., applies to the Australian bush as well. But because of way it is constructed in the nationalist literature, the bush is a “particularly harsh, relentless and unforgiving” mother

(Schaffer 22), one who is more likely to destroy those it allows within its borders than nurture them. The construction of femininity and masculinity in the Australian nationalist tradition is, then, dependent on a kind of abject relationship between the “real” Australian and his feminine

(or feminized) opponent. It is a relationship in which desire does not necessarily lead to satisfaction, but to “a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming, . . ., a friend who stabs you” (Kristeva, Powers 4). And, this paradoxical perspective has not only influenced men’s and women’s conceptions of what it

77 In many ways, the “type” continues to be promoted and exploited through such figures as Paul Hogan’s “Crocodile Dundee,” and Steve Irwin’s “Crocodile Hunter,” figures that have great appeal, particularly in the United States. 146 means to be Australian, but also the ways in which men’s and women’s constructions of

Australian identity have been valued by the larger culture.

It is important to consider here that the version of events Schaffer traces is part of a larger attempt by feminist and postcolonial thinkers of the late twentieth century to reread the 1890s as a pivotal moment in Australian literary history, the moment which divides Australian “colonial” literature from Australian “national” literature. Such a reading might seem logical given the political consolidation of the nation at the time. But as Brian Kiernan has noted, the distinction between “colonial” and “national” and, more particularly, the promotion of the masculine,

Australian “type” were not actually the dominant foci of the fin-de-siècle Australian literary world. Contemporary assessments of the era, such as H.G.Turner and Alexander Sutherland’s

The Development of Australian Literature (1889) and Desmond Byrne’s Australian Writers

(1896), reveal instead a great variety of literary voices and perspectives—both male and female—which addressed the question of national identity from every possible angle. But though many of the male writers considered in these analyses, such as Marcus Clarke and Adam

Lindsey Gordon, would remain relatively canonical for much of the next century, the same cannot be said for their female colleagues.

Susan Sheridan explains that the bias against women writers of the era was due to the assumption that they did not write “historical fictions that are ‘preoccupied with men’s lives, searching for epochal dimensions’ in the Australian experience” (5). Instead, it was thought that writers such as Ada Cambridge, “Tasma,” and Rosa Praed only explored the “condition of middle-class women in colonial Australia, and the social conventions governing relations between the sexes” (Sheridan xiii). And though their focus certainly has much to say about

Australian constructions of identity for their contemporaries, it was not compatible with the 147 fantasy of the “real” Australian that would become so dominant over the next decades. So, by the time Nettie and Vance Palmer would write their influential literary histories, Modern

Australian Literature (1924) and The Legend of the Nineties (1954), these female voices of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were all but forgotten. They would have to wait until the end of the twentieth century for the feminist reevaluation of the Australian literary canon to once more give them a place from which to speak.

Rosa Praed’s Australian Life.

One of the charges leveled against these women writers is that the “domestic” focus of their fiction means they have “nothing interesting to say about the great issues in contemporary society”; therefore, their writing is assumed to have “little to do with the development of a national identity” (Sheridan 4-5). But, as noted earlier, few Australian writers had such a quintessentially Australian colonial experience than Rosa Praed. In many ways, Praed’s early life reads like that of a heroine in an adventure novel. She was born in 1851 in a slab hut built by her father on land he was squatting78 on the edge of the known reaches of the Colony of New

South Wales. Her formative years were spent moving constantly from one pioneer station in the

Queensland bush to another, and as a young child she played with the aboriginal children whose parents either worked on her father’s station or were members of the tribes on whose traditional lands her father’s station lay. When her father became a member of the newly formed

Queensland government in 1862, he moved his family to the capital city of Brisbane, and Rosa became integrated into that city’s highly stratified social world. In 1872 she married Arthur

78 “Squatting” was a form of settlement particular to Australia’s pastoral lands and established after the Imperial Act of 1846. Under this system, leases for runs in the unsettled districts were granted for a term of fourteen years, and the fee paid was contingent upon the stock carrying capacity of the run. This system allowed men like Murray-Prior 148

Campbell Praed, a younger son of a well-to-do English banking family who had come to

Australia to make his fortune, and they moved to his cattle station on Curtis Island, just off the

Queensland coast. When that venture failed, they relocated to England, where Campbell Praed’s family set him up as the manager of a brewery in the Midlands, and Rosa Praed began her successful career as a professional writer.

When we look at these facts, our training as readers of adventure novels might encourage us to think of this life as one in which just enough glamour and exotic were mixed to give it a romantic appeal. Yet though in her fiction Praed sometimes gave certain aspects of bush life a romantic veneer, she rarely romanticized her own early experiences. The areas her father

Thomas Murray-Prior squatted in the 1850s were true frontiers in the sense that the fences that bounded the area appropriated for his enormous cattle and sheep stations were usually the only tangible divide between what Europeans knew and did not know about the country they were colonizing. Beyond those fences was the “Never-Never” out of which all manner of terrors could and did come to threaten the physical and emotional lives of the settlers. The aboriginal tribes that had lived in these areas for millennia resented the intrusion of the settlers and their animals, and the relationship that ensued between the two groups eventually amounted to little better than outright warfare. In several of her works Praed either makes reference to or imaginatively reproduces the 1857 massacre of the Fraser family at Hornet Bank, the next station to the west of the Murray-Priors.79 Such incidents and the horrendous counter-massacres carried out by the settlers and Native Police would leave Praed with the sense that during those early

to occupy enormous tracts of land without actually having to buy it outright. For a history of the system, see Australian Bureau of Statistics. 79 At Hornet Bank all women and children were bludgeoned to death by members of the Yiman tribe while the men were out mustering cattle. The bloody reprisals all but exterminated the Yiman. This incident is described in much detail in the two collections of memoirs, Australian Life: Black and White and My Australian Girlhood, but it also reappears in graphic detail in the otherwise erotic-exotic fantasy Fugitive Anne; a Tale of the Unexplored Australian Bush. 149 bush years her family lived in an “atmosphere of murder” where death and treachery were the norm, not the anomaly (Life 40).

The trauma of those experiences haunted her throughout her life, and she herself acknowledged the effect it had had on her psychological development:

My childhood, albeit that in some respects it was an exceedingly happy one, has

always been a kind of nightmare to me. . . . I still walk warily in long grass lest a

death adder should be lying close to my feet. I have not ceased to dream that I am

on an out-station besieged by Blacks; and many a night do I fly through the

endless forests, and hide in stony gullies, pursued by my aboriginal as ruthlessly

as was ever De Quincy by his Malay. (Life 27-28)

Clearly the idea that the inner space of Australia held limitless possibility appealed to Praed’s father, who time and again transplanted his family to new outback homesteads; nevertheless, the reality of the Australian frontier would scar Rosa Praed for life.

But in many ways the terrible inter-racial violence Praed experienced would not affect her as profoundly as did the less easily discriminated, but just as damaging violence that was part and parcel of life on the colonial frontier: violence against women. Jennifer Isaacs notes that incidents of bush women fearing for their safety “were extremely prevalent in the bush” (213) because their isolation, their attachment to the homestead, and their physical vulnerability made them easy prey in a violent culture. Though there is only fleeting mention of actual, physical violence against white women by white men in Rosa Praed’s memoir writings, it was one of the most constant preoccupations of her fictional work, especially where it was sanctioned as part of the marriage contract. In Fugitive Anne and Sister Sorrow, white women are physically abused by brutal husbands who take advantage of the isolation of the Australian bush to hide their deeds. 150

And in Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land, an aboriginal woman’s plea for help to escape from her physically abusive native husband almost severs the bonds of marriage between the

Irish-Italian Lady Bridget and her Scottish-Australian husband when Colin refuses to allow

Bridget to intervene in the matter. Clearly, it did not take a great deal for Praed to imagine how such violence could occur, and it is entirely possible—if not likely—that she was exposed to it at some time. Praed’s publishers were often appalled by what they considered the frankness of her representations of physical and sexual violence against women, and, especially in the early stages of her career, she would often find herself rewriting such scenes because, as George

Bentley once told her, as a Mrs. Praed, “you cannot so well say what Mr. Praed may” (qtd. in

Clarke 59; italics mine). Nevertheless, they persist in one form or another from her first novel to her last.

Colonial bush women like Rosa Praed saw danger and violence infiltrate every aspect of human life, even—or especially—the most intimate ones: marital sexual relations and childbirth.

Nineteenth-century bush families were usually very large, and it was common for women to bear the burden and danger of childbirth without medical or even knowledgeable assistance. These harsh conditions did, of course, take their toll on the women’s physical health and, because the incidence of child mortality was also very high, they extracted a high emotional cost as well. In later writings, Praed describes with particular melancholy the gradual physical decline of her refined, well-educated, Irish-born mother, Matilda Murray-Prior.80 Matilda was not born to bush life, but she followed her husband faithfully and gave birth to twelve children, many of them in remote slab huts far from family, friends, or medical assistance of any kind. In addition, her health was often compromised by bush diseases such as “Sandy Blight,” a disease of the eyes 151 caused by flies which at one time forced Matilda to live for a year in a darkened room with bandages over her eyes (Clarke 15). In 1868 at age forty-one, Matilda, whose oldest child was twenty and her youngest two, finally succumbed to the advanced consumption that had plagued her for some time. Rosa Praed helped nurse her mother through the painful last stages of the disease, and she was so devastated at Matilda’s death that her hair fell out as a result of the trauma (Clarke 24).

The affinity Rosa Praed felt for her mother and her mother’s fate would impact Rosa’s life in immensely important ways. For the first few years after her mother’s death, Rosa stepped into her mother’s social role, accompanying her father to government social gatherings and acting as his hostess when he entertained at home. But for Thomas Murray-Prior, whose affairs with other women even during Matilda’s lifetime had earned him the title of “the old sinner”

(qtd. in Clarke 24), it soon became imperative to marry. His courtship of Nora Barton, who was only four years older than Rosa herself,81 encouraged Rosa to give serious consideration to the kind of future she wanted for herself. Given the social constraints of the time, Rosa’s only real option was to marry, and it was commonly thought amongst her family that her ambition was to marry an Englishman and live in England (Clarke 30). To marry an Australian squatter would in all likelihood have meant a fate something akin to her mother’s, but in Arthur Campbell Praed and his English connections, Rosa perhaps saw the glimmer of other possibilities.82

In time, the Campbell Praeds would settle in England, but not before the unfolding of yet another Australian bush experience that would leave Rosa Praed physically and emotionally

80 Praed spends some time detailing her childhood memories of her “frail, delicate-complexioned . . . helpful and gay” mother in An Australian Girlhood, (54-55). But portraits of Matilda also appear at other points in Praed’s fiction, for example as Agatha’s dead mother Sister Sorrow and Brenda Vallis in The Luck of the Leura. 81 Rosa and Nora eventually became good friends, commiserating with each other on succeeding pregnancies and sharing ideas and even reading lists. Nora was later to provide many of the details about life in the Australian backcountry that would find themselves into Rosa’s novels. 152 devastated. Campbell Praed’s newly acquired cattle station on Curtis Island, which had the ominous name of “Monte Christo,” had, Rosa would later admit, “sounded so romantic,” but what it actually offered—even to a girl of the bush like Rosa—was “a mean, sordid, grubby destiny” (Girlhood 259, 263). The primitive condition of the station’s main homestead made her long for the picturesque, well-organized homesteads of her youth; the hired hands were sullen and uncooperative, and as likely to vanish as stay for any length of time; for months meals would be based on variations of salt tack; and Rosa Praed would later write with particular aversion of the tormenting multitudes of “monstrous” and “devouring” island mosquitoes (Girlhood 265).

The station was even more isolated than the homesteads of her childhood because as an island off the Queensland coast it was “on the road to nowhere—being indeed itself at the other end of

Nowhere” (Girlhood 267). The loneliness of the island’s situation was compounded by the fact that Campbell Praed often left Rosa alone for weeks at a time as he mustered cattle and did business on the mainland. Rosa’s suspicions about her husband’s fidelity during these long partings were eventually verified, and the rift that developed between them would add to her growing aversion to their sexual relationship and the pregnancies that resulted from it (Clarke

35).

The hardship and utter loneliness Rosa Praed experienced on Curtis Island brought her to a state of near despair, especially since she realized that in her haste to marry she had irrevocably bound herself to a husband with whom she had little in common. Campbell Praed was an

Englishman, but not the cultured, spiritually refined Englishman of her dreams. Though their marriage would remain mutually respectful until Campbell’s death in 1901, both would look to other kinds of relationships in order to satisfy their very different emotional and spiritual needs.

82 Rosa Praed later satirized her situation in her 1886 novel Miss. Jacobson’s Chance. In the story a young woman has only six months in which to choose a husband from a pool of colonial suitors. 153

As a true nineteenth-century, middle-class English gentleman, Campbell Praed found solace in his work, his role as man-about-town, and like Rosa’s father, a series of extra-marital affairs; but for Rosa the relational void was much harder to fill.

All alone on Curtis Island, she began to experiment with evoking the kind of relationship which would eventually become the most important of her life: a “feminine” relationship based on a combination of spiritual, emotional, and intellectual affinities rather than physical ones. On

Curtis Island, this would mean developing and continuing her relationship with the spirit of her dead mother through occult means, such as automatic writing. But later in life, it would mean gravitating toward relationships with both men and women that Praed felt transcended time and space. Eventually Praed came to believe that the trials and joys of her present life were connected to her actions and transgressions in past lives—in both ancient Rome and even the mythical nation of Atlantis. She was convinced that the intensity and kind of her relationships in the present were directly due to the influences of spiritual forces one could only see with

“Second Sight,” or “the eyes of the soul” (Praed, “About Second Sight” 696).83 Consequently, she would spend a great deal of her later life battling the difficulty of expressing what the eyes of the soul could see, but which was so hard to form into words.

Patricia Clarke notes that Praed’s relationship to language and writing was fostered by her mother from a young age, and it was further encouraged by her father’s love of the “treasures of European culture” (13). It is not a complete surprise, therefore, that when the Campbell

Praeds finally arrived in England in 1876, Rosa brought with her, not only the indelible

83 Praed’s gravitation toward the occult from the 1890s on was a logical step given that mysticism and the study of spiritual communication had long been ways she had sought to make sense of her experience. Alex Owen suggests that the emergence of such interest during the fin-de-siècle was one of the developments that marked it as “modern” because “advanced occult theory and practice represented an acute engagement with the concept and experience of self that underscored the self’s multiplicity and contingency, and exemplified the modern elision of self and consciousness” (“Occultism” 73). Certainly for Praed it was occultism that finally helped her to develop a human 154 memories of her Australian life, but also an ambition to succeed as an author. And succeed she would. In her various incarnations as “Mrs. Murray-Prior,” “Mrs. Praed Campbell,” and “Rosa

Praed Campbell,” Rosa Praed would publish some forty well-selling novels whose themes ran the gamut of Australiana, social realism, occult and/or theosophy, and even the fantastic-erotic.

She would have a play produced in the West End, would co-author novels with the Irish politician, Justin McCarthy, and be received by the Prince of Wales as the author of Nadine, a novel revealing the horrible personal cost extracted by English social convention for women.

But despite her highly successful integration into the English social and literary scenes, she felt

“neither English or Irish though nearly all my life has been spent in the British Isles.” Her

Australian experiences meant that she could “never smell the pungent aromatic scent [of gum leaves] which for twenty three years was the breath of my nostrils, without being carried back to the old, vivid world, so much more real than this in which most things have happened to me”

(qtd. in Clarke 41).

Unlike the other women of this study, whose childhoods and young womanhoods took place in the relatively peaceful and comfortable surroundings of middle-class, mid-nineteenth century Great Britain, Rosa Praed’s youth was spent in a place where such peace and stability were desired, but often unimaginable. Throughout her fictional writing, we can see the tension between her acceptance that this past is inerasable and essential to her identity and her fluctuation between hope and hopelessness that she might be redeemed from the burden of it in the future. It is perhaps no coincidence that this is especially true of the works which appear at the three crucial moments of her career I have chosen to investigate. Her first novel, An

Australian Heroine, which was published only four years after she arrived in England, and the

relationship which did to some extent heal the utter isolation and loneliness she had felt since her mother’s death at least. 155 last novel she created during the Great War years, Sister Sorrow: A Story of Australian Life, both use Curtis Island as the backdrop to their heroines’ gradual enlightenment. And though her last work The Soul of Nyria: The Memory of a Past Life in Ancient Rome purports to be a transcription of medium-assisted conversations Praed had with the spirit of a slave girl who lived during the reign of Domitian, it is a work which has a great deal to say about the burden of the past on the actions of the present.

An Australian Heroine (1880)

When Rosa Praed’s first novel appeared in early 1880, she had good reason to be proud of her achievement. The Praeds were a successful banking family with some personal connections to the Chapman brothers of the literary firm Chapman and Hall, but Rosa’s success was due to her own ambition and tenaciousness. As indicated earlier, the fact that she had literary aspirations at all was due to her parent’s early encouragement, but Rosa saw writing not just as a way to satisfy her yearning for a literary life. It was an acceptable way for a middle- class woman like Praed to create an income independent of her family’s. Patricia Clarke notes that there are signs in Rosa’s private correspondence that in these early English years Campbell’s

“capriciousness” with money meant that she was often short of money for her personal use (55).

As a young, colonial woman living in Victorian Northamptonshire with—at the time—four children under the age of six in her care, Rosa’s options were certainly circumscribed by her circumstances. Nevertheless, the strength of character that would later make her a formidable figure for her young Australian relatives supported her resolve to succeed. At first her returned manuscripts made the weight of the Praed postal deliveries a standing family joke (Clarke 49), 156 but after two years of rewriting and constant negotiations, Chapman and Hall finally produced the first of her many novels, An Australian Heroine.

The title of Rosa Praed’s first novel emphasized her connectedness to her birthplace and established her as an Australian writer, a fact of which she would remain very proud.84 In important ways, it was also a declaration of her belief that a uniquely Australian character was not just the provenance of men. Since the early years of the Australian colonies, works with the term “Australia” in their titles had appeared regularly in England and Australia, but the majority of these tended to celebrate the land’s mystery and men’s conquest of it. Some of the works were poetic responses to the unique qualities of the Australian landscape and life, but in the main they were chronicles of exploration, chronicles and fictions of settlement, and adventure stories.85 Richard Phillips argues that the “unexplored” status of the Australian interior during the nineteenth century made it a favorite setting for writers of adventure fiction because it offered “space for boyish men and manly boys” (68) to prosper in the service of the colonial ideal. The connection between “Australia” and heroic action by men in the colonial arena was, therefore, well established by mid-century, and the 1880s and 1890s saw the publication of many works celebrating the role of men in the Australian adventure.86

What makes the title of Rosa Praed’s first novel so remarkable, then, is that it connects

Australianess to the heroism of an Australian woman at a time when the roles women played in

Australian life were not usually thought of in heroic terms. In her groundbreaking study Damned

Whores and God’s Police, Anne Summers suggested that Australia’s convict beginnings

84 Throughout her career, she would think of and describe herself as an Australian writer. So, for example, in 1902, she reiterated this connection by dedicating her latest book of memoirs, My Australian Girlhood, to “My Fellow- Australian Writers: This Token of Goodwill.” 85 Joy Hooton and Harry Heseltine’s Annals of Australian Literature gives a useful chronological documentation of the titles of these works 157 impacted Australian women’s lives long after transportation ended because of the ways in which women, crime, and domesticity were linked in the popular imagination. From the moment the

Australian penal system was established, convict women were thought of as irredeemable degenerates, and though they were often married women and mothers, the system ensured that their identity as criminals superceded any other social identity they might have had. One result of this state of affairs was that social activists like Caroline Chisholm fostered programs whereby young women with non-criminal backgrounds were brought to the colonies to marry, bear children, and act as “God’s police” within the domestic setting. Thus, in Australia the dichotomy between moral and immoral women was enforced by the conflation of morality with domesticity and immorality with single womanhood. Rosa Praed’s choice of title is therefore a declaration of independence from the ways in which Australian women had usually been linked to domestic morality, marriage, and crime. But this certainly does not mean that these issues are ignored in the novel.

On the contrary, one of the primary concerns of this novel is to reveal the ways in which nineteenth-century Britain’s obsession with cleansing itself of its abject twisted the connections between morality, marriage, and crime into a veritable Gordian knot. An Australian Heroine is the story of a young, Australian-born woman’s gradual enlightenment to the burden of this heritage and her struggle to assess the strengths and dangers of her character in a society that prefers the bonds of prescription to the uncertainties of self discovery. But it is also a story which criticizes the unquestioned self-righteous morality of the English upper middle-class culture which presumes to judge Esther Hagart as inherently immoral because of the circumstances in which she grew up. Both Esther’s parents and the Englishman she marries

86 Robert Dixon’s study, Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, gender, and nation in Anglo-Australian popular fiction, 1875-1914, examines many of these works, particularly those of Ernest Favenc, and includes Praed’s 158 were well-born in England, but their inability to rein in their desires to the degree required of them by British society meant that they transgressed in ways that seriously circumscribe how

Esther can engage her own future.

Thus, before she can live a life of her choosing, the Australian Esther Hagart, has to come to terms with the burden created for her by her English parents’ and husband’s transgressions against her, and her name reflects the ancientness of her dilemma. Like Hagar from the Old

Testament, Esther Hagart is cast into the wilderness in order to conceal a shame in which she has had no real part. But unlike Hagar, Esther is returned to society, where she transforms not only her own life, but the lives of others with whom she comes into contact. In other words, Esther

Hagart does not become a heroine because she does adventurous acts in scenes of colonial conquest. She is a heroine because, like the biblical Queen Esther, she endures in difficult circumstances—both at home and in a strange kingdom—and through her example, manages to influence the fate of many.

Throughout the novel, the reader is presented with the kinds of reversals of expectation which make its title so intriguing, and whether the action takes place in England or in Australia, nothing is quite what it seems at first. The resulting uncertainty eventually helps unseat many of the commonplaces nineteenth-century British culture used to establish difference between the

British self of the colonial center and the various British selves of the peripheries. Perhaps the most striking of these is the way in which spiritual innocence and purity of character is linked to

Australian rather than English place. In the literature of Australian conquest, and even in much of the Australian nationalist literature, the Australian bush is often pictured as lowering, unpredictable, and dangerous, and those who have an affinity for it are usually savages or

Fugitive Anne. 159 criminals.87 But in this novel, Esther’s affinity and comfort with the Australian natural world is indicative of her inherent innocence. The first we see of her, she is posed like Hans Christian

Anderson’s Little Mermaid on “a bare, black rock, which bristled out from the side of a cliff, worn into crannies and furrows by the incessant dash of the ocean” (AH 1). She has been reading fairy tales—the only books available to her—and dreaming while “the sea gurgled backwards and forwards with a cradle-like motion” (AH 1). This fanciful opening image of

Esther dreaming on the edge of the mysterious, ever-changing ocean highlights her isolation, her naivety, her promise, and paints her in highly romanticized terms as a “child of nature” who has managed to retain all the best qualities of human nature.

But this assumption is destabilized as soon as another human being enters the scene, for we soon learn that most of Esther’s problems are not of her own making. From Joe, a man who works with her father, we learn that Esther’s beautiful and educated mother has recently died, and that Esther’s father is a dangerous drunk who does Esther physical harm at the slightest provocation. On her deathbed, Esther’s mother exhorted Esther to never leave her father despite the danger that he poses to her physical well-being, and so Esther is bound by this promise to both a father who might kill her and a life of poverty, drudgery, and ignorance. Most of the male characters in the novel contrive to remove or at least protect Esther from the danger her father poses, but Esther honors her promise to her dead mother to stay with her father in order to “keep him from harm” (178). The irony here is that Esther’s mother places her daughter in danger by insisting she stay near Esther’s father, and this is in order to keep Esther’s father from danger.

In most romances, the kind of selfless fidelity Esther’s mother imposes on her daughter would be within the bounds of nineteenth-century domestic ideology, but in this novel, such

87 So, for example, in two Australian “classics,” “Rolf Boldrewood’s” Robbery Under Arms and in Marcus Clarke’s For His Natural Life , the bush is initially a haven for criminals, but it eventually destroys even them. 160 fidelity does not have the same resonance because it is based on a rather different set of criteria.

Later in the novel it is revealed to the audience—and much later to Esther—that Esther’s father and mother were never married, that her mother was, in fact, an adulteress who had become romantically involved with Robert Isherwood, a handsome but wild young man of good English family. When Isherwood committed forgery, was caught, tried, and sent to Australia as a convict, Esther’s mother, who was pregnant with Esther at the time, left Lydiard, her legal husband, and followed. She lived in squalor and poverty until Isherwood received his ticket-of- leave, after which the pair moved to the island, changed their name, and developed the pattern of behavior which eventually led to their mutual destruction—and threatens to do the same to

Esther.

What is interesting about this series of events is that Praed clearly delineates the connection between the physical and psychological decline of the couple and their mutual wish to live according to the satisfaction of their desires alone. Instead of helping each other to negotiate the human social network that relies on symbolic structures such as language and law to give meaning to semiotic experience, their impulse once landed on the island was to recreate the wholly semiotic experience of the symbiotic mother-child dyad. Passionate, romantic love can, as Julia Kristeva reminds us, lead to “vertigo of identity, vertigo of words” because in important ways the experience evokes the complete mutuality and “nontime” of preoedipal experience. It erases the boundaries between “instant and eternity, past and future,” and the

“abreacted present, fulfills me, abolishes me, and yet leaves me unsated . . . “ (Tales 7). In other words, the impulse of Esther’s parents to lose themselves in their love for one another on an island far from civilization does not have the results they may have expected. As Rosa Praed well knew, the idea of splendid, romantic isolation on an out-of-the-way island is not always 161 supported by reality, and in part this is due to the fact that isolation from networks of human relations can make it easier for the symbolic structures on which social contracts depend to erode. Without the checks and balances of the symbolic, semiotic experience can overwhelm an individual’s ability to function in human society at all. And, paradoxically, because in such a situation desire cannot be named or given contours, its satisfaction becomes impossible and its results monstrous, destructive, and inevitable.

Esther’s parents’ inability to balance the demands of the symbolic and the yearnings of the semiotic are particularly clear in the physical and psychological degeneration of Esther’s father. Though in death his face returns to the “beauty for which it must have been remarkable,” during his life on the island his features became so “disfigured with drunkenness and vice” that those who knew him in England have trouble recognizing him (AH I 1). From the conversations and observations of other characters, we learn that Isherwood/ Hagart had turned to drink only once he and Esther’s mother arrived on the island, and though he tipples constantly, he is

“always dry inside, and craving a drop” (AH I 7). Drink does, to some extent, allow him to throw off many of the social and behavioral bonds that help define an individual’s identity, but in

Hagart’s case such inhibition has become monstrous. So, for example, he drinks himself into a state where he sings and dances naked on the beach at night and falls asleep in the waters of the shoreline, but in his drunkenness he also brutalizes Esther’s mother and eventually causes her death. Cut off from the demands of human society, Hagart has become consumed by his quest for the satisfaction of a desire that cannot be satisfied, and he likens the experience to having “a creature inside me always gnawing; it has sharp pointed teeth; it is slimy like a snake” (AH I 68).

Ultimately, the only possible outcome for his longing for erasure of identity is death, and though 162 at one point he appeals to Esther’s mother’s spirit to “stay and take care of me” (AH 68), he eventually commits suicide by cutting his own throat.

But though the isolation of the island is shown to encourage the kind of physical, psychological, and moral degeneration that eventually destroyed Esther’s parents, it is made very clear that the root of the problem is not the island. It is English society’s inability to acknowledge and accept its culpability in the creation of its own abject. So, for example,

Esther’s mother is described by her husband, Lydiard, as “an educated and extremely emotional woman whose impetuous nature had fretted against legitimate restraint, and had yet found a perverse satisfaction in sacrificing itself at the command of passion” (AH 209). This reading of his ex-wife’s actions places the blame for their mutual unhappiness squarely on a flaw in her nature, and yet, at a later moment Lydiard admits that it was his unreasonable passion for her that had led to their marriage in the first place. A young and friendless woman, she had fallen under his influence when he lent her some money, and though he knew that she neither cared for him or really wanted to marry him, he had forced the issue because it was his desire. In his drunken state, Hagart also defers the blame for his wife’s death onto something other than himself—in his case monsters with “long, white fingers, like adders tails” (AH 68). And later Brand, Esther’s

English husband, will also place the blame for their unhappy marriage on Esther’s criminal heritage rather than the fact that he had practically seduced her and then insisted on their marriage despite Esther’s misgivings.

Eventually Esther has to confront the complications wrought by these unacknowledged

English transgressions, but prior to the advent of Lydiard and Brand into her island world, she is likened to the kind of eternally innocent, yet “precocious child who the gossips say ‘is not long for this world’” (AH 2). It will be this mixture of social innocence and knowledge that human 163 experience cannot be confined to or adequately expressed by the laws of the symbolic that will give Esther her particular identity and distinguish her from English women. When George

Brand meets Esther on the island, he is attracted to her because her natural grace, depth of spirit, and sensitivity make her so different from the English women he has known. As he says, it is strange “to think of your growing up in this wild place among a set of rough sailors, without any society, or schooling, or that sort of thing which comes naturally to other girls. I thought all young women had to go through a course of drilling before they could even hold up their heads or walk properly” (AH 87). Of course, Brand also believes that educating women is a mistake because “one does not want to be talked to by a woman about art, and the sciences, and ‘ologies”

(AH 88). But Brand’s attraction to Esther eventually survives not just his flightiness and a long separation, but also the education she receives once she is transported to England.

One of the only positive actions Esther’s father takes once on the island is to ensure that in the event of his and her mother’s death, Esther would be taken care of by his English brother.

As an avid collector of fine objects and believer that “the influence of art should be shed upon the multitude” (AH 237), Sir Emilius Isherwood agrees to bring Esther to England in order to educate her, and her arrival in Sir Emilius’s house, which “was decorated after the most approved fashion of modern aestheticism” (AH I 247), signals a new phase in her development.

Esther is immediately sent to a boarding school, but she soon finds that her uncle’s wish she should consider her early life forgotten is impossible to comply with. At school, Esther learns to love learning and eventually comes to understand “the touch of genius in [her] organization, which filled her with vague yearnings that seemed to mock at her cramped personality, and that her meager education utterly failed to satisfy” (AH II 26). Unlike the other English women of her acquaintance, Esther does not find an outlet for her unique qualities in the development of an 164 accomplishment like painting, music, writing, or social graces. Instead, she finds her identity in her capacity to understand and transmit to others that life occurs on more planes than the ones prescribed by English society.

Esther’s most important trait and the element of her nature which distinguishes her from all other women in this novel is that she is able to form relationships with both men and women which inspire them to do the very best at whatever they desire. Unable to forget her Australian past and yet not overcome by it, she is able to take what she has learned about the depths and heights of unspeakable experience and balance that with the laws and language that are the hallmarks of English social experience. Unlike most English men and women, she does not rely on the rules of social engagement or status to understand who she is because such rules are not the sole means through which she engages with the world As she says in a moment of enlightenment, “I never do anything, but I am thinking and wishing” (AH II 28), and it is her ability to inspire simply by being which makes her relationships with others so very creative for all involved. Whether it is, as in the case of her would-be lover, Bernard Comyn, because her inner intellectual and spiritual promise inspires him to formulate his dearest theories about esoteric issues of art and life; or, as in the case of her friend, Frederica Talmage, because

Esther’s physical and spiritual beauty inspires her to do her very best art work, Esther encourages others to transcend the utilitarian nature of most English interpersonal relationships—simply because she is Esther.

The catch in this state of affairs is that it is only possible for Esther to develop this uniquely creative character because she is initially unaware of the ways English society reads her parents’ actions, her Australian experiences, and the fact that those actions and experiences influence who she is. One of the defining qualities of the abject is that despite most efforts to 165 contain it, it is an essential part of human existence and will, therefore, eventually return in one form or another. So, despite the efforts of the many male characters who are privileged to the facts of Esther’s birth and early experiences to hide them from her, Esther is eventually faced with the ways these facts and experiences are read by the very society that wished to keep them at bay. In other words, she is eventually confronted by the reality that according to the laws and language of English society, she is the illegitimate child of a felon and adulteress and is on the brink of repeating her mother’s mistake by leaving a husband for a man whose moral integrity is compromised by the fact that he would sanction the breaking of the marriage bond. Her only choices are either to simply ignore this reading and act according to the demands of her desires, or to find another way to bring the two registers of experience back into some kind of alignment.

And it is the latter, initially more difficult course that she chooses.

When An Australian Heroine first appeared, its early critics remarked on the author’s skill in turning to realism rather than romance for its ending. This was attributed to Rosa Praed’s

“knowledge of the world’ (qtd. in Clarke 58), but it is in fact in keeping with the tenor of the work as a whole. Though Esther is aware that Brand and herself can never have the kind of spiritual, intellectual, and emotional union she so desires, she chooses to stay with him rather than repeat her mother’s actions. In so doing, she makes a choice which asserts that she is neither victim to her desires nor willing to transgress the laws of human relationship that English society demands she live by. There is a personal cost, however, because, as the narrator notes,

“life would not be what it is, if two antagonistic natures, starting with an entire divergence of thought and temperament, could in a short time develop into a state of complete harmony” (AH

III 265). Yet despite the pair’s personal difficulties, the marriage eventually produces children whose existence has “cemented their [parents’] interests more closely, [and] their union has 166 acquired all the semblance of happiness” (AH III 266). Their marriage may not be perfect, but it is one that leads to mutual creation rather than mutual destruction.

Esther’s heroism, then, is established through her acceptance of her parents’ influence on her fate and her ability to refuse to allow that influence to overwhelm her personal choices.

Though she decides to stay with a husband who “has never held the key to his wife’s truer sensibilities” (AH 266), Esther’s actions resonate in important ways throughout the society she inhabits. By facilitating Esther’s financial independence from Brand, Lydiard is able to ease

Esther’s sense of dependence on her husband and establish some closure to the sorrow and guilt he felt about his part in his wife’s demise. Esther’s ideal lover, Bernard Comyn, finds a degree of happiness in his marriage with Esther’s friend Frederica Talmage, and Brand’s cousin, Lina, with whom he was about to have an affair, is able to “make an excellent wife to the Bishop” (AH

268). Thus, by learning to accept and even tap into the energies of a dissonant relationship,

Esther is able to ensure a degree of happiness for herself and the well-being of many, and maintain her hold on the direction of her fate.

An Australian Heroine is a novel about the courage to come to terms with the ghosts of the past. Though some of what occurs could be attributed to the influence of the supernatural, it is primarily a drama which explores the psychological effects of human action and inaction on the lives of a community. The fact that some of the drama relies on a series of coincidences—

Lydiard happens to choose the particular, out-of-the-way Australian island his errant wife has landed on to set up his colony of philosophers, and Esther happens to visit relatives in the

English countryside whose estate is next to the one Brand will inherit—certainly places it within the bounds of romance fiction, but it does not end as a romance should with the hero and heroine correctly united. Reviewers at the time found it “amongst the most powerful and interesting 167 novels of the season” and considered Rosa Praed an author of “exceptional ability” who evinced

“considerable future promise” (qtd. in Clarke 58). The novel’s interest in the ways psychological burdens will affect an individual’s or even a nation’s relationship to the present marked the beginning of Rosa Praed’s life-long interest in representing the otherwise unspeakable in fictional form. And this interest would appear in much of her fiction over the next thirty-six years in as many fictions concerned with religious, occult, theosophical, and other spiritual themes.

Sister Sorrow: A Story of Australian Life (1916)

When Sister Sorrow: A Story of Australian Life appeared in 1916, Rosa Praed’s career as a writer and personality in the English literary scene was beginning to wane. In the years before

World War I, she had produced “an avalanche of books” (Clarke 182), some of which carry the marks of her best work, and some of which were little more than potboilers. Praed was aware that these latter works were not of the quality she would have liked associated with her name,88 but the prewar years were ones in which she depended almost exclusively on the profits from her writing for her income. Between 1912 and 1915 she published two largely forgotten, sensationalist novels on occult themes, The Body of His Desire: A Romance of the Soul and The

Mystery Woman; she edited Our Book of Memories: Letters of Justin McCarthy to Mrs.

Campbell Praed, a large volume of letters written to her by the Irish politician, Justin McCarthy, with whom she had had a long friendship; and she wrote an Australian novel, Lady Bridget in the

Never-Never Land. This latter work, which speculates on the possibility of modern Australia as a multicultural nation, is one of the few Praed novels to be considered seriously by contemporary

88 As one critic noted in his review of Body of Desire, “Mrs. Campbell Praed would never have made her reputation with this kind of thing” (qtd. in Clarke 183). 168 critics or republished in recent years.89 In addition, it serves as an interesting intellectual counterpoint to the more stylistically confused and emotionally laden writing of Sister Sorrow, which followed just one year later and was the last novel Praed ever published.

One of the difficulties Praed faced in these early war years was that she had begun to doubt her ability to write about contemporary Australian life. In the forty years since the Praeds had left Curtis Island, Rosa Praed had returned to her birth country only once, in 1895, but the experience had not been a happy one. Patricia Clarke speculates that the emotional shock of returning to a place which at a particular historical moment had left such an indelible impression on her imagination and memory meant that it was difficult for Praed to process and utilize what she actually saw twenty-five years later. Praed’s “visit was too short and her mind too vividly engaged in the past for her to move her Queensland settings forward in time. Instead her visit conjured up all her old memories of her Australian past” (Clarke 149). And though many of the

Australian novels written after this visit are considered among her best, most of them were set in an Australia more reminiscent of her youth than the one of her more recent experiences.

But even more troubling for Praed than this general dissatisfaction with contemporary

Australian place was her sense that the Australian girls and young women she had evoked in many of her writings—her Australian heroines—were also a thing of the past. In an 1899 article,

“A Daughter of Greater Britain: the Australian Girl,” she would write eloquently about her ideal, but as yet imaginary Australian girl:

If the Australian girl who aspires to be a novelist, poet, or painter, would seek

inspiration in her own forests, among the weird gum-trees and the giant chasms

which suggest cataclysms of a pre-historic Titanic period: if she would listen to

89 See Fiona Giles’ analysis of the “lady heroine” in Praed’s work, particularly Lady Bridget. Lady Bridget was republished by Virago in 1987 and by Indypublish.com in 2002. 169

the voices of her own woods and streams, allow her imagination to be thrilled by

the strange glamour of the Bush: commune with her own nurse, Nature—then

she might become the pioneer in an entirely new intellectual region, and give the

world a type of woman-worker, at once feminine and vigorous, practical and

poetic, such as no other country has yet produced. (20)

Such a woman certainly appears in various guises in Praed’s fiction, but she was not to be found among the flighty, superficial, giggling Australian girls Praed seemed to meet everywhere in

Europe and Australia.90 The one modern, Australian girl who did interest Rosa was her own half-sister, Ruth, who was thirty-four years her junior and aspired to be a professional writer like

Rosa. Ruth’s profoundly nationalist sentiments and appreciation of socialist thought were indicative of her fiercely independent nature, and though she was certainly a good-looking girl,

“she seemed to Rosa to have no lovers nor to want them” (Clarke 191). Though Rosa studied

Ruth with the intention of using her as a possible character in one of her novels, that character never completely materialized. Nevertheless, some aspects of Ruth would appear in the young

Australian woman Rosa created as the protagonist of her last novel, Agatha in Sister Sorrow.

Unlike An Australian Heroine, which is narrated by an omniscient third-person commentator, Sister Sorrow is told from the point of view of a character who is intimately connected with all that occurs and is invested in a particular outcome for the story’s action.

Agatha Carfax is a combination of elements from Rosa’s own experiences, some wish fulfillment, and some of the traits she admired in Ruth. Like Rosa, Agatha is a bush girl of the squatter class of the late nineteenth-century whose character is much more complex than is outwardly apparent. As she explains, “I have been told that usually, on first acquaintance,

90 Praed was particularly critical of the giggling girls she saw roaming the streets of Brisbane whose “petty gossiping” and “perpetual talk about incomes” offended her sense of personal dignity (Clarke 147-148) 170 people take me for a smooth-lipped characterless sort of female and are surprised when they come upon an upstanding bit of Australian bed-rock” (SS 12). Her strength of resolve, keen- eyed observations, and bush smarts make her a formidable opponent when roused, but these characteristics are of less use to her in urban settings where the rules of language and law are enforced by social conventions than they are in the bush where such conventions don’t necessarily apply.

Agatha’s situation at the beginning of the novel echoes Praed’s own painful position as a young woman. Her sensitive, educated, ladylike mother has died, and her father has recently married Clara, a woman not much older than Agatha herself who reminds Agatha of “a drawing room cushion set on an end, tied round the middle, and with a big blue-eyed, red and white, worse-for-wear doll’s head stuck into the top of it” (SS 15). Agatha’s half-sisters Bee and Bel are versions of the modern Australian girls Rosa had so disliked during her trip in 1895. Bee is described as “a perfect Bush hoyden” who comes into a room “swinging her large hips and her thick plaits of corn-coloured hair,” while Bel is a slightly younger, slimmer, and cleverer version of the same (SS 14). Though they are extremely likeable, they are of a very different class and type to Agatha, who has little in common with their interests or occupations. Since her father’s remarriage, Agatha’s role within the family has become unclear and her relations with her parents somewhat strained. But, unlike Rosa Praed, Agatha does not have to rush into marriage in order to solve the problem of what to do with herself because her mother has left her a sizable fortune. Nevertheless, Agatha’s position within the family is that of an uncomfortable outsider, and her sense of discomfort is only softened by her attachment to Dolores Lloyd, her step-sisters’ governess. 171

Dolores Lloyd is a young Welsh woman who has been employed by the family to teach

Clara’s children “French and German and music, and to be generally instructed as to the art and literature of the countries they were going to visit in the wonderful Grand Tour” (SS 33). Bel and Bea are completely uninterested in becoming the kind of accomplished young women

Dolores is meant to make them, but their lack of interest in Dolores allows Agatha to make the kind of connection with a human being that she so desperately craves. Although certainly qualified as a governess, Dolores is completely unsuited to life in the Australian outback. As

Agatha explains, Dolores “was terrified at the gum-grown wilderness, shuddered at the sight of blacks and ran for her life if she happened to meet a working bullock or a harmless milker” (SS

35). But she appeals to Agatha because she offers a way of relating to the world which differs considerably from the pragmatic materialism of her family and most other acquaintances.

Dolores, whose given name is actually “Sorrow,” is a seer, and though she lives among human beings, her susceptibility to the ebbs and flows of the spiritual world make her almost incapable of interacting with others who are what she calls “so terre-a-terre” (SS 38).91 Agatha’s affinity for Delores develops over time from a kind of school-girl infatuation into a friendship that has “spiritual potencies which no other love has ever equaled” (SS 36). Theirs is a mutuality which echoes something of the mother-child dyad, but it is not one that destroys because their non-symbolic connections are always mediated by language and vice versa. As Agatha’s teacher, Delores helps her understand the connection between language and law, but as Agatha’s friend, she opens up the possibility that human connections can be “strangely and inextricably bound up with those closer ties of flesh and spirit” (SS 36). Delores’ role as the purveyor of language and culture is well understood by Agatha’s parents, but her susceptibility to the world 172 of the spirit has them agree “in Bush vernacular, ‘that Miss. Lloyd was short of a sheet of bark’”

(SS 40). Nevertheless for Agatha, Delores eventually becomes an embattled love object, a kind of Holy Grail, whose recovery from the clutches of a malevolently evil husband, an American bounder called Phil Wilkens, becomes Agatha’s quest and the path to her physical and spiritual fulfillment.

Though some of the action of the novel takes place in an outer-urban area of Leichardt’s

Town, a colonial town much like the Brisbane of Praed’s youth, it only serves to set up the relationships between various characters that will be fleshed out once the action moves to

Oronga Island, Praed’s last incarnation of her Curtis Island experiences. Where in An Australian

Heroine Praed had given the island’s natural surroundings a fairy-tale-like potential, in this novel the experience is, perhaps, much closer to the truth. When Agatha arrives at the homestead, she calls it “the most hideous and uninviting habitation I had ever set eyes on,” and describes the surrounding landscape as “a blackened waste of burned tussocks of blady grass and scorched undergrowth” (SS 180). Even the bush which presses in on the outskirts of the property is eerily, quiet, and though Agatha says she “was well accustomed to the kookooburra’s note,” she is unnerved for a moment when one “set up peals of fiendish laughter” as she approached the homestead for the first time (SS 182-183). There is nothing remotely appealing about the place, and Agatha takes it as further evidence of Wilkens’ inherent evil that he seems to enjoy her dismay at the ugliness, discomfort, and disarray of the place.

What Oronga Island offers Wilkens is the privacy and isolation he needs to carry out all his evil plans. His motivation for bringing Agatha to the island is to trap her into investing in the property and remove her from the vicinity of her sisters and possibly foiling his plan for them.

91 The model for Delores Lloyd was Nancy Harward, an Anglo-Indian woman with whom Rosa Praed shared many years of her life. Nancy’s influence on Rosa Praed’s life and work will be addressed more fully in my discussion of 173

Wilkens’ ultimate goal is to marry Bee, Agatha’s buxom younger sister, who had become an heiress after gold was discovered on her father’s property. His lust for Bee and her money is presented as just another of many such conquests created by his insatiable appetite for material satisfaction, and Dolores’ role in this plan is in some ways due to accident rather than design.

Agatha speculates that Wilkens was actually frightened of what Delores’ second-sight might reveal about him, and it was due to “a blind instinct of self-preservation” that he decided to get her and her abilities under his control by marrying her (SS 376). Once on the island, Wilkens had beaten and mishandled Delores to the extent that Agatha finds bruise marks and other scars on her body, and in order to make way for his marriage with Bee, he had begun to poison

Delores with small, but potent, doses of an Arrow poison from South America. In Agatha’s estimation, Wilkens is a “soulless abnormality” (SS 375), an incarnation of evil whose death in a whirling maelstrom in the waters off the island is a kind of poetic justice.

On its most basic level, Sister Sorrow is about the ancient and epic struggle between good and evil spiritual forces which Praed had come to believe underlay the course of every human’s destiny. Her belief in “the Great Whole . . . where things exist after they have once happened and have been put there” (Praed, Soul 43), meant that any present struggle was a reincarnation of a previous struggle, and that an individual’s instinctive sympathy or antipathy for another human being was directly related to their relationships in past lives. In this novel, Agatha uses the legend of St. George and his struggle with ur-evil in the shape of a dragon to explain the many roles the characters of the novel play in this most ancient of battles. Delores’ helplessness and spiritual innocence makes her the reincarnation of the virgin bride whose lot it is to be sacrificed to the dragon in order to satisfy its hunger. She is pursued the incarnation of evil, Phil Wilkens,

Soul of Nyria. 174 who uses his powerful spirit to manipulate Delores into marrying him and using her second-sight to help him in his criminal activity.

Interestingly, instead of abdicating the role of hero to a male character, Agatha sees herself as a female St. George, whose role it is to fight the evil that threatens to consume

Delores. But because the evil she faces is so powerful and malevolent, she turns for help to a male counterpart—her ideal man, Torvald Helsing. Helsing is a kind of eco-colonist who happens to live on Oronga Island. He uses his knowledge of the natural world to counter some of Wilkens’ evil actions and, like a medieval knight, cannot express his love for Agatha until he feels he is worthy of her. Together Agatha and Helsing contrive to outwit Wilkens by removing

Delores from his influence and putting her through a course of physical and spiritual detoxification. Although Helsing uses his expertise in natural remedies to counteract the poison which is killing Delores physically, it is left to Agatha to save her from the “mental terrors” that are manifestations of the spiritual poison wrought by Wilkens’ influence (SS 307). As Agatha and Torvald work together, she becomes aware that her story of St. George, though certainly adequate to the task at hand, is not the final version of the tale. Like most stories, its end was just the “first step on the ladder which every soul must climb in fulfillment of its immortal destiny” (SS 378), and the story ends with Torvald’s declaration of his love for her and the beginning of their life together.

In his study of Rosa Praed’s occult and fantasy texts, Robert Dixon points out that in such texts Praed has a tendency to stray from a unified perspective and mix genres because she “was able to imagine freedom and the exercise of power only in discrete episodes that must be separated from the narrative as a whole” (95). The resulting texts are often made up of sections which are usually complete within themselves and then stitched together—sometimes more 175 successfully than others. In Sister Sorrow, even Agatha is aware that the story has “many loose links and unknotted threads,” but she attributes this to the fact that it is written from her perspective alone, which means “I have only written what I saw and heard and felt myself” (SS

375). Praed’s choice of a first-person narrator does, then, give the work a degree of uniformity, but there are two crucial moments where Agatha’s narration is superceded by the voice of another character.

The first of these is the narration of Delores’s prophetic dream in which she sees herself drowning in a maelstrom off the shores of Oronga Island while Wilkens, who has willed her into the situation, watches her from a boat and laughs at her destruction. The second of these interspersed narrations is given by Wilkens, who after an evening of tippling Agatha’s father’s whiskey, unwisely tells a story of a stage-coach robbery in the “Red Man’s Cache Mountains” near the New Mexico-Texas border where a large amount of gold and other loot was mysteriously spirited off by a gang of robbers (SS 86-88). Later Torvald Helsing reveals that

Wilkens himself was the ring-leader of the robber gang, and that Wilkens is being pursued around the world by his nemesis, Matthew Herrebine, a cutthroat Mexican criminal who was

Wilkens’ partner during the robbery.

Though both of these stories border on the outlandish, they are important not just because they prefigure much of what will happen later in the novel, but because of the way Agatha uses them. Earlier in the novel she muses that telling a story is

something the same kind of process as building up the model of an antediluvian

animal from a few fossilized bones.. . . When one’s mind gets into focus for

reproducing what has taken place in the past, one is, in a sense starting a machine

of which science doesn’t know enough to have got under perfect control. So a 176

system of selection is impossible and one can only make the best of the stuff

which comes forth. (SS 24)

When Agatha first hears both of the these stories, her initial reaction is to consider that they are truth rather than fiction, but because she does not immediately understand their significance, she ferrets them away in her memory. Eventually it comes time for her to connect the pieces of her experience into a whole, so she takes their essential elements and uses them to flesh out her narrative of St. George. This narrative justifies Wilkens’ destruction because it exposes the extent of his evil influence and casts Agatha in the role of a warrior in the service of all that is good in human life.

Thus, like Esther in An Australian Heroine, Agatha works bravely through her difficulties; but, unlike Esther, Agatha achieves her dearest desire because as a modern,

Austalian woman of independent means she has the freedom to chart her own course of action.

She is unencumbered by the kinds of social bonds which limit what Esther can do, and in many ways this is due to the important changes that have occurred in the Australian society in which the action takes place. Agatha’s family looks with hope and exuberant energy to its future because it is not burdened by a history of transgression, destruction, and despair. And instead of having to be returned to England and English society in order to develop her intellectual and spiritual abilities, Agatha can turn for inspiration to a multi-cultural Australian society that can even be found on an out-of-the-way place like Oronga Island. Agatha is heroic in the traditional sense because she is instrumental in saving Delores from Wilkens’ evil influence, and she is rewarded for this heroism at the end of the novel by being paired with Torvald Helsing, an ideal partner who clearly will love and cherish her spiritually, intellectually, and physically. 177

Soul of Nyria: The Memory of a Past Life in Ancient Rome. (1931)

The wish-fulfillment that gives the ending of Sister Sorrow its rosy glow was, however, not part of Rosa Praed’s experience in the years following the novel’s release. Though she would continue to write diligently, the last thirty years of her life were filled with great personal tragedy and a sense of and ever-increasing unbridgeable difference between the world in which she had flourished as a writer and the world she faced after World War I (Clarke 193). In some ways her personal tragedies sound like the events of a sensation novel. In 1901, her husband

Campbell died of heart failure, in 1902; her daughter Maud, who had been deaf for the greater part of her life, began to show signs of mental instability and had to be institutionalized; in 1904, her oldest son, Humphrey, was killed in a tragic car accident in California; in 1925, another of her sons, Geoffrey, was gored to death while hunting rhinos in Africa; and in 1932, her youngest son, Bulkley, committed suicide after years of battling depression and cancer. A decline in her health and the sorrow she felt as most of her children predeceased her under tragic circumstances eventually compromised Rosa Praed’s ability to write, but she would have to face one even more devastating event before fate was done with her: the death in 1927 of her companion of twenty-eight years, Nancy Harward.

Rosa Praed met Nancy Harward at the house of Alfred Sinnet who, because he knew of

Rosa’s interest in occult communication and incarnation, contacted her in 1899 about Nancy’s extraordinary abilities as a medium. Under Sinnet’s influence, Nancy had been placed in a trance during which she had entered into the identity of Nyria, a slave-girl who had lived during the rule of the Roman Emperor Domitian, 79-81A.D. Though in her “normal” state Nancy knew nothing about Roman history or life, as Nyria she would give complex and detailed descriptions of Rome and life in a Roman household that was supported by the historical scholarship 178 available at the time. The meeting between Nancy and Rosa marked the beginning of a connection that would shape the lives of the two women both in terms of the work they would produce together and in the mutually edifying nature of their personal, intellectual, and spiritual attachment.

Rosa and Nancy’s relationship has always been a matter of interest for Praed’s critics, and that is not surprising given the degree to which after 1899 Nancy was involved in the production of Praed’s novels and writings on spiritualist issues. Nancy was not only the medium through which Nyria spoke. Prior to her meeting with Rosa, she had aspired to a writing career and had managed to place several poems, short stories, and serials in British magazines and journals. But as her relationship with Rosa deepened, Nancy’s own literary aspirations were gradually incorporated into their joint productions. The Mystery Woman, though published under Praed’s name, was in large part a novel Nancy had developed, and her hand—or mind—in later works such as The Ghost, By Their Fruits, and The Body of His Desire is evident in the novels’ deeply occult and mystical focus. Patricia Clarke notes that although Nancy’s own writing became subsumed by her service as Rosa’s literary secretary and companion, there is

“little to suggest that Nancy found this situation oppressive” (168). In rather extraordinary ways, they became “as one,” and Rosa would later write, “I cannot think that the deep love Nancy gave me—the one absolutely unselfish love I have been blessed in knowing—can count for nothing—No one—even my own children—ever loved me as she loved me” (qtd. in Clarke 209).

In recent years, Rosa and Nancy’s relationship and its influence on the published work has been viewed rather differently by Praed critics. Feminist critics of the 1980s and 1990s, including Sheridan, Fiona Giles, and Spender acknowledged Nancy’s importance to Rosa’s personal life and the production of Nyria, but tended to downplay Nancy’s role as Rosa’s 179 intellectual and creative partner. In “The Queer Lives of Rosa Praed,” Damian Barlow examines the women’s multifaceted relationship through the lens of queer epistemology and claims that an unacknowledged heterosexual bias amongst Praed critics has led to a devaluation of Nancy’s role in the production of Praed’s work. Barlow suggests that Rosa and Nancy’s relationship was a kind of “Boston Marriage,” but one which depended on the discourse of theosophy for its

“language, theoretical base, [and] legitimacy” (346).92 Like Barlow, Praed’s most recent biographer Patricia Clarke addresses the complexity of this relationship and underscores the complicity of both women in the production of the works after 1899. Clarke suggests that “the characterization of their relationship as lesbian is justified in the sense that their strongest emotions and affections were directed towards each other to the exclusion of others” (168) and that it is impossible to view these later novels as anything but collaborative pieces.

After the initial shock produced by Nancy’s death, Rosa sought to fill the void left by

Nancy’s absence with “feverish activity” (Clarke 203). But eventually her longing to reestablish some kind of connection with Nancy led her to Hesther Dowden, a well-known London medium.

During the psychic sessions with Hesther, Rosa communicated with both Nancy and her dead sons and eventually decided to revisit the materials she had collected during her work on Nyria, a novel published in 1904 based on Nancy’s transmissions as a Roman slave girl. Rosa’s return to this material was therapeutic. As she later wrote, “I feel as though I have met again, after years, a dear little friend. She was always so utterly real to me, my poor little Nyria” (qtd. in Roderick

194). And, of course, the work encouraged Rosa to speculate further why her own life had taken

92 Praed’s appreciation of Nancy’s abilities as a medium would also have allowed their relationship to develop a sexual aspect through non-physical means. As Alex Owen has noted, “mediums surrendered and were then entered, seized, possessed by another. In this sense mediumship was a re-enactment of prescriptive notions of the female sexual role. At the same time, however, the diverse sexualities expressed through the vehicle of possession countermanded all that was signified by a closed definition of orthodox femininity” (Darkened 218). 180 the shape it had and how that shape was related to “the Memory of the Great Whole,” the psychic space she believed was the repository of all memory and existence.

The problem with the work Praed had done for the 1904 version of Nyria was that in order to give the story the kind of coherence necessary for a novel, she had had to organize the material chronologically—where its transmission had been rather random—and narrate much of what happened in third-person rather than leave it as “just [Nyria’s] own babblings” (qtd. in

Roderick 194). In addition, she had had to cut some 50,000 words of the text which she felt compromised the integrity of Nyria’s story in important ways. When Rosa returned to the material in 1928, she decided that, instead of presenting the material in fictional form, it would be better to present it as non-fiction, as an example of psychic research, and thereby be able to give Nyria’s story as it had been transmitted—as a first-person narrative when Nyria spoke, and as a third-person narrative when “The Commentator,” another psychic entity who spoke through

Nancy, would clarify something Nyria could not have known. Thus, the work reads like a play script with sometimes long, uninterrupted monologues by Nyria, other more fragmented sections which indicate some instability in Nancy’s transmission, and sections of conversation between

“The Instrument” (Nancy), “The Recorder” (Rosa), and sometimes “The Commentator.”

Nyria’s story is one of intense loyalty and personal integrity on the one hand, and deceit, villainy, and revenge on the other. Nyria had been born a princess in the Hercynian Forest, had been captured in war as a very young child, and brought to Rome as a slave. During her service in the great houses of the Roman oligarchy, she became attached to Valeria, a beautiful noblewoman who was unhappily married, and after the death of Julia, Nyria’s legal owner, she was bought by Valeria’s husband. When Valeria fell in love with Licinius Sura, a Jewish nobleman, Nyria facilitated the affair out of love for Valeria and despite her own misgivings. At 181 about the same time, Nyria was drawn by her intensely spiritual nature to the nascent Christian community which at the time was outlawed in Rome but met secretly in the hills surrounding the city. Because she kept no secrets from Valeria, Nyria told her about the secret meeting place of the Christians, never dreaming that Valeria would ever use the information against her. But, unfortunately Sura was also drawn to the Christian community, and in a fit of terrible jealousy brought on by the revelation that Sura already had a mistress and child, Valeria divulged the location of the Christians’ secret meeting place to the Roman authorities. Nyria, along with the others, were rounded up, sent to the Coliseum, and torn to pieces by wild beasts while Valeria did nothing to help them.

When Rosa Praed first used the Nyria material to create the 1904 novel, her relationship to it was that of a fascinated outsider. She appreciated Nancy’s occult abilities for what they could do for her in terms of getting copy for another novel, and she was not above trying to

“bend the slave-girl’s inclinations in the direction desired” even if Nancy/Nyria clearly said she

“cannot bear to go to Rome” (Soul 30). But by the time Rosa was preparing the material for The

Soul of Nyria, her attitude toward Nyria and her story had changed dramatically. During the séances with Hesther Dowden, Rosa had come to the incontrovertible conclusion that she and

Nancy had been connected in various incarnations from the times of the ancient hunter-gatherers

(Clarke 209). Though sometimes only Nancy’s incarnation would appear, they were often incarnated together—in Atlantis, in ancient South America—but also in Rome where Nancy was incarnated as Nyria and Rosa was incarnated as Valeria.

Though there was some comfort in the idea that their incarnations would probably keep on happening, there was also the rather terrible realization for Rosa that as Valeria she had been directly responsible for Nyria/ Nancy’s death. Damien Barlow suggests that Rosa and Nancy’s 182 relationship as formulated through the discourse of theosophy “takes a bondage and discipline form” in which there is “a strong emphasis on . . . Rosa being punished for her former deeds”

(347), and this may account for the tone of some of the commentary which is interspersed throughout the work. So, for example, early in the project, Rosa as “The Recorder” found Nyria

“drawing me on by fascinating hints of dramatic possibilities yet invariably baulking my curiosity by obstinate refusals to go further in actual fact” (Soul 31). At first Rosa had tried to force the issue by saying, like an angry parent, if they could not go on with the task at hand, “it might be better to discontinue their meetings,” but in a moment of reflection recorded afterwards,

Rosa notes that she became “doubtful as to the lawlessness of tampering with psychological mysteries” (Soul 31). As a result, she shifted gears and approached the issue from another direction. Instead of remaining disheartened by Nyria’s reticence, Rosa expressed some sympathy for the “signs of apprehension and . . . physical trouble” Nyria/Nancy was showing and took into account that the physical distress Nyria was suffering might have some physical effect on Nancy (Soul 31). As Rosa says, “though on coming to herself the Instrument had no remembrance of her experiences in the Nyria personality, and though I had been assured that no harm would result from them to the physical vehicle, Nyria’s terror and suffering had seemed so utterly real, that pity forbade me to prolong the ordeal” (Soul 408). By learning to care enough about Nyria/Nancy to recognize when she suffers in her most recent incarnation, Rosa would be changing the cycle of pain and suffering which had characterized their relationship throughout time.

Another interesting aspect of this presentation of the Nyria material is that Rosa records how at certain moments in the transmissions Nyria disappears, and a less compliant entity, The

Commentator, takes over the telling of the story. This Commentator still speaks through Nancy, 183 but the voice is commanding, critical, authoritative, and yet conveys the impression of “practical wisdom and exceeding kindness” (Soul 35). So, for example, when early in the project Nyria becomes disoriented and loses control of language because Rosa has suggested that there may be a connection between herself and Valeria, The Commentator steps in and suggests that Rosa refrain from making such comments at that point. He explains that “the Roman child [is] “totally unable to grasp the idea and her mind would be in a state of hopeless bewilderment” if The

Recorder were to insist on forcing the issue (Soul 35). The Commentator leaves Rosa with the sage advice that she should not “expend yourself on the fretting of the soul. There are different roads by which one can advance and, for all, the end is the same. Purity of the heart and motive is what really matters” (Soul 36).

As the character of Nyria unfolds, one wonders why she would be so attached to Valeria.

Despite her awareness of her noble birth, Nyria is never anything but an obedient and respectful slave, and her extraordinary strength of character makes her a trusted and valued member of whatever household she happens to serve. She undergoes savage whippings and great emotional distress in order to serve Valeria, and yet she receives little encouragement or even notice from her. One reason for this is certainly the class difference between the two—as a noblewoman,

Valeria is not in the habit of thinking about the needs or desires of her slaves—but Valeria is also so emotionally removed from Nyria, so completely self-centered, that she does not really care whether Nyria is sacrificed to satisfy her vanity. As Paulinus, her husband, says, “this woman hath been no better to thee than any other mistress would have been. Why shouldst thou care for her? Thou knowest what she hath done” (Soul 393).

When this truth finally dawns on Nyria, she is at first devastated because, as she tells The

Recorder, “thou knowest what was my love for Valeria—that, to me, my domina was a goddess 184 and that no pain could be as bitter as the pain of knowing that she had sent me into this state of great, deep misery” (Soul 416). But the strength of character and independence of spirit that are the hallmarks of Nyria’s personality enable her to solve this most difficult of quandaries. In this moment of great distress, she realizes that she has invested Valeria with the most precious of her own traits so that Valeria has become the personification of the best that Nyria could be. In order to come to some kind of peace with the fact that her vision of Valeria is not supported by the reality, Nyria reasons that “if I forgave I should have her again” (Soul 417). In other words, if she forgave Valeria’s actions, Nyria could return to her fantasy of Valeria’s perfection which was so necessary to her psychological well-being. She cries out, “Oh, come to me, Nyria—the other Nyria—and enter into me so that I may find mercy!” and though it takes some time, eventually “She—that other Self—entered into me. I knew it, for I felt that I had melted at last . .

. that I forgave—or rather that Valeria was mine again” (Soul 416-417).

On almost every level of analysis, The Soul of Nyria is a stunningly complex work, and perhaps not one to which there is any real key. Praed took great care to ensure that its piecemeal structure reproduced as faithfully as possible the experiences as she and Nancy had them, and so the work is rife with the kinds of disjunctions and aporias one does not expect to find in a work by a “colonial” writer such as Rosa Praed. So, for example, the story of what happened to Nyria in the prison of the Coliseum is begun during the first pages of the text, but it is not completed until the end when it is told at least three different times, by Nyria, by the Commentator, and by a third medium whose version of events is interpolated into the third volume. The exhaustive appendices which are scattered throughout the book are meant to verify the truth of Nancy’s transmissions, but as Patricia Clarke notes, “there seemed to be a fallacy in verifying every detail of Nyria’s communications—this would only prove the writer was a good researcher and knew 185

Roman history” (205). Their presence has the rather odd effect of annoying a reader intent on following Nyria’s narrative because Praed used copious quotations from ancient historians to add authority to her claims. The reader must, therefore, wade through a number of different styles of writing—those of Praed, the historians, the Commentator, and Nyria herself—and such constant change of narrator thwarts an easy, continuous reading of Nyria’s transmissions.

Nevertheless, as Nyria, Nancy gave Rosa a story that both helped her write a novel and, later, helped her make peace with herself and the life she had been allotted. And that was more than enough for Rosa. Whether Nancy Harward was a schizophrenic, a fraud, or merely able to access psychic suggestions by Rosa Praed herself, in the great scheme of things it did not really matter. As Rosa Praed herself explained, “in her normal personality, [Nancy] remembered nothing that had happened to her in her Nyria consciousness. Much pondering gave no solution to the problem. . . . She had lived. . . . She still lives—now or two thousand years ago, what matter! She was Nyria. . . . She is Nyria. . . . That’s all there is to it” (Soul 43).

Staging the Unconscious

In Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, Julia Kristeva speculates that the success of Freud’s psychoanalytic method is not just due to analysis, but also to the fact that it extends an invitation—an invitation to stage the unconscious. The stories we tend to repeat— both in analysis and out—help us make sense of our lives and are in important ways art forms,

“novel[s] in miniature,” because they transpose experience into “rhetorical figures, syntactic structures, and superimposed characters” (327). It would be unfair and probably incorrect to say that all the stories Rosa Praed told were on some level therapeutic, but the fact that each of the stories examined here retells an earlier story does imply that they had a significance beyond the 186 more immediate goals of celebrity or simply making money. From an early age Rosa Praed had intimate acquaintance with the terror and the promise of experiences that defy signification, and she well knew what they could do to human lives if left unchecked. As a result, she would spend most of her life trying to give them a name through her writing.

In both An Australian Heroine and Sister Sorrow, Praed explores the traumatic experiences of her youth and young-womanhood and seeks to clarify the ways in which an individual is or is not culpable for his or her destiny. In An Australian Heroine, she speculates about the wisdom of Britain’s attempt to make Australia its dumping ground for the abject.

Because of the actions of others, Esther Hagart has to struggle to bring what she has learned through her complex experience of life into alignment with what the social contract needs of her.

She does eventually do this, but at a certain cost to her personal happiness. In Sister Sorrow,

Agatha Carfax finds herself immersed in a much more elemental struggle—the struggle between

Good and Evil spiritual forces for the control of human lives. Ultimately, she succeeds in her conquest of evil because of the strength of her pure and fearless spirit, but she also succeeds because the Australia she inhabits has loosened the bonds that bound it to Britain and can now define who and what it believes itself to be.

In the years between Sister Sorrow and the publication of The Soul of Nyria, Rosa Praed came to believe that human destinies are affected by something much more ancient than national histories and something more immediately tangible than spiritual warfare. Nyria’s story emphasizes what Praed felt was an elemental human need for assurance that the human spirit can transcend space and time, that after our life on Earth stops, there is more than just nothingness.

Her belief in reincarnation encouraged her to acknowledge her own share in the production of pain and sorrow that seemed so prevalent in her experience; nevertheless, it also offered her the 187 hope that such sorrow might eventually cease. But though at the end of her life Rosa Praed turned to these otherworldly explanations for the course her life had taken, she could never quite shake off the vivid experiences of the Australian world of her youth. In a letter written a few years before her death, she expressed her surprise at the durability of her connection to the

Australia of her imagination:

Even I, after these long years of absence, my whole life formed of totally different

associates, can never get away from the Australian bush—Now in my old age &

utter loneliness as I wait for death which tarries too long—I seem to see more

vividly than ever the view from the Marroon veranda—the old racecourse &

paddock and the river with its still deep pools. (qtd. in Clarke 210)

Though she knew that this Australia had long passed away, in essence it was still with her, and she could allow it to inspire and comfort her as it had done throughout her long life. 188

Conclusion.

The Narrative of Disturbance or Disturbance of the Narrative?

“May I disturb you?” The civility and respect implied in this question usually make it hard to resist. Embedded in the language is an assumption that the speaker is interrupting the harmony of a particular perspective by drawing the addressee’s attention away from whatever he or she was doing. On the surface, the word “May” gives the addressee the option of not allowing him or herself to be disturbed, but its very politeness actually forces the addressee to do what the speaker wants—listen to what the speaker has to say.

The four women writers who are the focus of this study understood the value of this protocol well. Though they used their writing as a way to gain access to some of the material, social, and intellectual privileges of imperial British society, they also used it to question the various narratives of coherence and harmony upon which many ideals of British life depended.

The period of British history in which they lived and created had identified change as one of its defining qualities, and yet the writing of these women seems to suggest that the narratives commonly used to figure this change did not adequately address those elements of human experience which are uncomfortable, mysterious, and often downright disturbing. The expression of their sense that it is the play of experiences registered in the semiotic and the symbolic which give creativity and verve to human lives became their lifelong preoccupation, and they would use the quests of their novels’ heroines to illustrate the many ways this could be so.

Lucas Malet understood that, in order to unseat what she considered the “dullness” of the

English middle class, she needed to question the legitimacy of the narratives being used to knit 189 women into the English social fabric. In Mrs. Lorimer Malet contemplated the fate of a woman who is forced to choose between ways of being that have been fabricated according to the rules and needs of others. Malet implies that the real tragedy of Elizabeth Lorimer’s life was not the choices she made; rather the tragedy was the fact that there was no social role available to her that would have allowed her to develop the enormous promise she seemed to possess. In contrast, Damaris Verity in Deadham Hard comes to accept the absolute inadequacy of English middle-class culture to deal with people and experiences that stand outside its narrow scope. Her choice is to side with the outsiders, but in order to escape the wrath and violence of the society whose rules she repudiates, she has to satisfy at least one of that society’s rules by marrying.

The most enigmatic of Malet’s heroines, Barbara Heritage, also finds herself marrying out of necessity—this time financial—but for her the outcome is rather different. Unable to understand that for her husband she is the personification of his desire, she chafes at what she believes are the unfair bonds imposed by marriage. It is only once she finds herself pregnant with her husband’s child that she is able to align her desire for the power of the symbolic with the role that her husband and her society needs for her to play.

For Somerville and Ross, the difficulties their heroines face in their quests for individuality are compounded by competing narratives of Irish national identity. These authors are not so concerned with the ways English-Irish relations are construed as they are with looking at the ways Anglo-Irish men and women are being constructed according to nationalist fantasies.

In An Irish Cousin, Theo Sarsfeld has to learn that her uninformed preconceptions about what constitutes Irish identity inhibit her ability to really understand the ways in which the Anglo-

Irish are deeply and emotionally rooted in Irish culture. Christian Talbot-Lowry in Mount Music is in many ways Theo Sarsfeld’s opposite in that she is so in tune with the semiotic rhythms of 190

Irish life and place that she finds it impossible to make herself heard in a world where such rhythms are drowned out by strident nationalist narratives. The heroine of Sarah’s Youth, Sarah

Heritage-Dixon, is a young woman whose life is complicated by her inability to contain the elements of her nature that glean her the nickname “Battling Sarah.” But unlike Christian, for whom marriage is really the only option at the end of the novel, Sarah can choose to defer such a choice because of changes to the social fabric wrought by Ireland’s political independence in the twentieth century.

The trauma Rosa Praed experienced in her personal life meant that her works reflect an awareness of the overwhelming difficulties individuals face when experience registered in the semiotic is not balanced by symbolic meaning. In An Australian Heroine, Esther Hagart only develops the confidence to change the course of her life when she learns how to refuse her identity as a victim to her desires. She can do this because she realizes that the narratives used to establish identity are as malleable as they are powerful. Agatha Carfax takes this idea one step further in Sister Sorrow where she makes sense of a traumatic experience by transposing the conflict into a story of the struggle between ultimate Good and ultimate Evil. Unlike Esther, who must give up her fantasy of living according to an ideal, Agatha succeeds because she equates her actions with those of the mythical hero St. George and battles Phil Wilkens, the personification of evil, in order to rescue her beloved friend Delores. The story of a battle to save an ideal lies also at the heart of Praed’s last work, Soul of Nyria. This fascinating compilation of what is purported to be transmissions by the spirit of a Roman slave girl from the first century A.D tells the story of Nyria’s struggle to exist in a world where there is nothing but her ideal self to sustain her. Nyria’s strength of spirit and character is remarkable, and even in the direst physical and psychological need, she is able to use her sensitivity to the power of the 191 unseen world to vanquish the forces that threaten to overrun her—be they physical, spiritual, or psychological.

Each of these stories has a double function: they are narratives which seek to show the various ways in which experiences registered in the semiotic underpin human existence, and they are narratives which seek to underscore the actual fragility of seemingly rock-solid realities.

They are narratives that evoke semiotic disturbance in language and narratives which ensure a healthy disturbance of the symbolic. They are narratives of disturbance and disturbance of narrative.

But, what of that cranky little lady stomping away in the London twilight? What should I say to her? Would all my talk of the need to balance semiotic and symbolic experience convince her she needs to change the way she sees me? I doubt it—much too esoteric for a murky London evening in December. In many ways I no longer long to set things right with her because as a subject-in-process I have been changed by the experience of engaging with the lives of these women writers and the stories they told. Nevertheless, after all this analysis and thought I need to say something to her: “Excuse me, madam!” “May I disturb you?” 192

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