Desk Notes No.30

Spinsters, Odd Women and Radicals edition: George Gissing and Dorothy Richardson; Marianne Werefkin and Gabriele Münter

Sep 29, 2024

Dear friends,

Autumn has arrived. There’s a bite in the early morning air, a crispness that brings with it a cosy sense of home and the day closing in around you. A warming up of nature’s palette from green to yellow and brown.

In 1854, Ford Maddox Brown painted a view from the window of his lodgings in Hampstead.1 Bathed in the golden light of low sun, the terracotta roof tiles of a nearby cottage glow preternaturally red. In the foreground a couple lounge on the grass, an umbrella tossed casually aside. A woman feeds her hens. The smoke of a bonfire billows in the distance; a gardener’s fork is propped against an allotment wall; men climb ladders to harvest apples. The whole scene is warm with rusty leaves.

The art critic John Ruskin, who made such a song and dance about the importance of realism, was put off by Brown’s suburban subject, describing it as, “very ugly.” Looking at the picture today his remarks seem absurd. To me, there is something charming about an old-fashioned suburban garden; something picturesque about a homemade greenhouse emerging from foxgloves and daisy-like cosmos. I’ve always preferred sitting among the scrambling pea frames and the fluffy fennel tops; the garden working and abundant.

And yet, in the 1850s when Ruskin criticised Brown’s English Autumn Afternoon, Hampstead’s environs were changing; new estates were going up. It’s increasing domesticity could hardly be expected to hold the attention of a critic so utterly devoted to the natural landscape and its geology. When I look through the window at my own suburban landscape, I can almost see his point. Victorian houses, gardens butting up to gardens — it’s still remarkably leafy. But in the short time I’ve lived here, many trees have been pulled down. Ash dieback has taken some gloriously tall, old friends, but blossoming fruit trees and other gnarled specimens have been lost to extensions, Wendy houses, and astroturf. I wonder how long the remaining trees — loved by the rooks, wood pigeons, and squirrels — will last. Autumn won’t be the same without them.

Print —The Odd Women by George Gissing (1893); Pointed Roofs, Backwater, and Honeycomb, published as Pilgrimage One, by Dorothy Richardson (1915-1917)

Pictures — Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and The Blue Rider at Tate Modern, London, until 20 October 2024

Print

The Odd Women by George Gissing (1893)

Pointed Roofs, Backwater, and Honeycomb, published as Pilgrimage One, by Dorothy Richardson (1915-1917)

“I would have girls taught that marriage is a thing to be avoided rather than hoped for. I would teach them that for the majority of women marriage means disgrace.”
Rhoda, The Odd Women

In 1851 a moral panic spread across the country. The census revealed there were half-a-million more women than men, with two-and-a-half-million women unmarried. What on earth could be done with them, these spinsters and old maids? Anne Thackeray Ritchie wrote a defence of the female position, drawing attention to the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women. The organisation (established by Barbara Bodichon of the English Women’s Journal and member of the ladies’ club at Langham Place) sought to expand the employment options available to women, ensuring their financial independence.

Yet the ‘problem’ of surplus women pervaded and, in 1893, George Gissing took the issue, along with Bodichon’s organisation, as inspiration for his novel The Odd Women, exploring this prejudice from the female point of view. The three Madden sisters, raised artistically and intellectually but thrown upon their own weak resources when their father dies unexpectedly, are contrasted with the energetic and confident Miss Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn who train women for work in offices. Rhoda is near fanatical about the female cause, radically against marriage and passionate about the importance of women being, “brought up to a calling in life, just as men are.”

Squashed together in a Lavender Hill bedsit, living on a diet of cheap potatoes, the two eldest Madden sisters are dependent and childlike, unable to realise a life beyond working, without salary, for board and lodging as teachers and companions. The youngest, Monica, is overworked in a linen draper’s shop, terrified of struggling, being alone and miserable like her sisters. While the eldest are enamoured by their old friend Rhoda — “Quite like a man in energy and resources. I never imagined that one of our sex could resolve and plan and act as she does” — Monica prefers the idea of marriage to life as an independent secretary, seeing the training college as, “an old maid factory.” But marriage, she comes to realise, is no “easy” life.

Meeting the forty-something Mr Widdowson in a park one afternoon, Monica takes the risky step of getting to know him. To modern eyes, the red flags are all there — excessive love letters, possessiveness, spying — but Widdowson is a polite gentleman in possession of £600 a year. As Monica tries to find some space for herself in this increasingly claustrophobic marriage, their confrontational, often violent, relationship illustrates the importance of marriage as, “an alliance of intellects — not a means of support.” Gissing confronts the domestic impacts of Victorian society’s gendered norms; the flawed idea that looking after one’s husband is a “privilege.”

“A monument of male autocracy. Never had it occurred to Widdowson that a wife remains an individual…”

“The bitterness of the situation lay in the fact that he had wedded a woman who irresistibly proved to him her claims as a human being.”

Widdowson, a deeply flawed and vitally relevant character, wonders if he might have been happier marrying a less intelligent woman. Meanwhile, the ostensibly liberal cousin Everard, attempts a free-union — cohabitation without marriage — with the radical Rhoda. Agreeing with the idea in principle, Rhoda questions its likely success — once passion subsides, could Everard respect her individuality and her politics? Might she be abandoned and thrown upon a castigating world? Would it not be better for women to reject the sexual instinct entirely?

The range and force of ideas put forward by Gissing’s characters brought to mind many other novels written in its wake. Thomas Hardy’s career was effectively finished by similar ideas about divorce and free-unions expressed in Jude the Obscure, serialised the following year in 1894. Then there’s Patrick Hamilton’s barmaid Ella who avoids a catastrophic marriage with the elderly Ernest Eccles in Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky in 1935. Tempted by the thought of rescue from her mundane, impoverished existence, Ella ultimately asserts her own desire.

Most striking though, are the connections with Dorothy Richardson’s first three novels following the life of young Miriam Henderson — Pointed Roofs, Backwater, and Honeycomb, published together as Pilgrimage One in 1917. The novels are set in 1887, just a few years after The Odd Women. Here Richardson observes not only a woman’s limited employment options and the poverty of dress, but the intellectual forcefulness of men, their automatic assumption of a superior position:

“Smooth brows and neatly brushed hair above; but the smooth motionless brows were ramparts of hate; pure murderous hate. That’s men, she said, with a sudden flash of certainty, that’s men as they are, when they are opposed, when they are real. All the rest is pretence. Her thoughts flashed forward to a final clear issue of opposition, with a husband. Just a cold blank hating forehead and neatly brushed hair above it. If a man doesn’t understand or doesn’t agree he’s just a blank bony conceitedly thinking, absolutely condemning forehead, a face below, going on eating—and going off somewhere. Men are all hard angry bones; always thinking something, only one thing at a time and unless that is agreed to, they murder. My husband shan’t kill me.... I’ll shatter his conceited brow—make him see ... two sides to every question ... a million sides ... no questions, only sides ... always changing. Men argue, think they prove things; their foreheads recover—cool and calm. Damn them all—all men.”

And yet, the women of both Gissing and Richardson’s novels, observe that a wife’s limited education — her inability to converse on matters of art, literature, classics, business, politics — often lie at the root of marital discord. “Why will men marry fools?” asks Rhoda.

“Put yourself in the man’s place,” says cousin Everard:

“Say that there are a million or so of us very intelligent and highly educated. Well, the women of corresponding mind number perhaps a few thousands. The vast majority of men must make a marriage that is doomed to be a dismal failure. We fall in love it is true… I tell you the simple truth when I say that more than half these men regard their wives with active disgust. They will do anything to be relieved of the sight of them for as many hours as possible at a time. If circumstances allowed, wives would be abandoned very often indeed.”

Observing marital relationships during her time as a governess in Honeycomb, Miriam draws a similar conclusion:

“Their husbands grew to hate them because they had no thoughts. But if a woman had thoughts a man would not be ‘silly’ about her for five years.”

It’s a dichotomy that never seems to resolve. And yet the attraction of love and companionship remains. Miriam daydreams:

“Of course, some day— someone, somewhere, wonderful and different from everyone else.”

““I love you” ... just a quiet manly voice ... perhaps one would forget everything, all the horrors and mysteries ... because there would be somewhere then always to be, to rest, and feel sure. If only ... just to sit hand in hand ... watching snowflakes ... to sit in the lamplight, quite quiet. Pictures came in the darkness ... lamplit rooms, gardens, a presence, understanding.”

This essential human condition — love — is the reason Rhoda’s fanaticism will always be at odds with the practical work of the training school. “The ideal we set up must be human,” says Miss Barfoot.

“Do you think now that we know one single girl who in her heart believes it is better never to love and never to marry?… What I insist upon is, that Winifred would rather marry than not. And we must carefully bear that fact in mind. A strained ideal is as bad, practically, as no ideal at all. Only the most exceptional girl will believe it her duty to remain single as an example and support to what we call the odd women…”

Whether she is married or not, Rhoda and Miss Barfoot agree that a confident, educated women is a happier woman, a more capable woman, a more attractive woman.

“It has made her a wholly different woman from what she would otherwise have been. Instead of a moping, mawkish creature, with—in most instances—a very unhealthy mind, she is a complete human being. She stands on an equality with the man. He can’t despise her as he now does.”

Their ambition is juxtaposed with the brutal reality of the single female experience; the experience of women raised for dependence. In the novel’s most poignant passages, Virginia Madden descends into lonely alcoholism. All her dreams slipping away.

Pictures

Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and The Blue Rider at Tate Modern, London, until 20 October 2024

“I am not man, I am not woman, I am myself”
Marianne Werefkin

At Tate Modern’s latest exhibition, Expressionists, I was most excited to see the works by Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin. Both were radical ‘new women’ cultivating their own artistic careers while enjoying, temporarily at least, ‘free unions’ with their male partners, artists Wassily Kandinsky and Alexei Jawlensky. Unusually, Werefkin and Münter provided the financial security in their relationships. In 1909 Münter purchased what would become known as the ‘Russian House’ frequently visited by key members of what would become the Blue Rider — August Macke, Franz Marc and Erma Bossi. Eschewing realism for emotion and spirit, the group experimented with colour and form, becoming increasingly abstract, and incorporating elements of Cubism and Futurism. In parallel with Vanessa Bell and Clive Grant at Charleston, Werefkin and Kandinsky decorated the house and furniture with their own designs. The Tate dedicates an entire room to the Murnau pictures and the objects used by Münter in her eclectic still life paintings.

One of these Murnau pictures, painted by Münter in 1909, sees Jawlensky and Werefkin lounging on a hilly slope. Werefkin sits up, looking out at the view, a huge hat perched on her head. Jawlensky leans away in the other direction. The couple had emerged from a difficult period that had seen Werefkin put her artistic career on hold for a decade. Just three years inside their relationship, in March 1895, Werefkin wrote:

“Emotionally I’m just as lonely as ever, for my ultimate attempts to find some resonance in another human soul these past three years have failed like all the others… For three years I have walked in step with him, opened door after door for him, shown him his talents, the mystery of art, burying myself behind feminine weakness, pretending to be studying on my own and tolerating his mistreatment of me.”2

Werefkin was facing an artistic crisis and uncertain whether an artistic career was even possible for a woman, explains her biographer Brigitte Salman, while continuing to believe intensely in the “higher good” of art. Deciding to throw her support behind Jawlensky, the couple left Russia for Munich where he could undertake further artistic study.

Their relationship was put under further strain when an agreement to remain chaste in service of their art was broken by Jawlensky. He had fallen for Werefkin’s underage chambermaid, fathering her child, the four living together under one roof until 1920. Werefkin’s self-portrait, painted shortly after her return to art in 1910, is filled with defiance. Turning to look over her shoulder, piercing red eyes challenge the viewer. In a palette of hot reds and almost neon yellow and blues, she is assertive and self-possessed. The difference between the way Werefkin portrays herself, and the way others paint her is marked. In pictures by Münter and Ermi Bossi she is soft, approachable, feminine.

In the exhibition catalogue, Charlotte De Mille writes about Werefkin’s interest in androgyny and the concept of ‘manwoman’. Her confident portrait of dancer Alexander Sacharoff, draped in a blue wrap, blushing cheeks, poised with flower in hand, is displayed alongside its preparatory sketch.

Intense feeling and thinking about art filled Werefkin’s decade away from the canvas. Her biographers argue that many of the ideas found in Kandinsky’s game changing book, Concerning the Spiritual In Art, which forms a key part of the exhibition, appeared first in Werefkin’s personal writing.

I have said little about the wonderful scope of Tate’s Expressionists — the rooms devoted to music and colour, to photographs of Tunisia, to the spirituality of animals. There is so much to see and learn here, I’m contemplating another visit.

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