British Women Writers 1914-1945

Professional Work and Friendship

Catherine Clay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351954495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Catherine Clay's persuasively argued and rigorously documented study examines women's friendships during the period between the two world wars. Building on extensive new archival research, the book's organizing principle is a series of literary-historical case-studies that explore the practices, meanings and effects of friendship within a network of British women writers, who were all loosely connected to the feminist weekly periodical Time and Tide. Clay considers the letters and diaries, as well as fiction, poetry, autobiographies and journalistic writings, of authors such as Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Naomi Mitchison, and Stella Benson, to examine women's friendships in relation to two key contexts: the rise of the professional woman writer under the shadow of literary modernism and historic shifts in the cultural recognition of lesbianism crystallized by The Well of Loneliness trial in 1928. While Clay's study presents substantial evidence to support the crucial role close and enduring friendships played in women's professional achievements, it also boldly addresses the limitations and denials of these relationships. Producing 'biographies of friendship' untold in existing author studies, her book also challenges dominant accounts of women's friendships and advances new ways for thinking about women's friendship in contemporary debates.

Chapter One

Women’s Friendship in Inter-War Britain

Networks: Feminism, Friendship and Time and Tide

On 14 May 1920 the first issue of a new weekly newspaper made its first appearance before the British public. Announced by The Times as a ‘New Paper Managed by Women’, this newspaper sought to provide independent coverage of social, political, economic and cultural affairs, and to treat these issues fairly, without bias, as they related to both men and women.¹ Holding the existing Press to blame after the First World War for inciting prejudice against women’s participation in public life, the women behind this paper sought to consolidate and advance women’s freedoms and influence following their (partial) enfranchisement in 1918, and to educate women readers in their new rights and responsibilities as British citizens.

This newspaper was Time and Tide, the unspoken corollary of the title (‘wait for no man’) indicating the spirited feminist forces that lay behind its otherwise sober appearance. The founder of this all-female enterprise was Lady Margaret Rhondda, a British businesswoman who had been active in the suffrage movement and now saw an opportunity ‘to change customs and influence ideas’ in a period which witnessed critical changes in the lives of British women.² In collaboration with other women known to her through the suffrage movement, and joined later by women from a younger generation of post-war feminists, Lady Rhondda built Time and Tide into a paper of considerable stature. With an early readership of between twelve and fifteen thousand, by the 1930s Time and Tide was offering serious competition to the New Statesman as the leading weekly review in Britain, its circulation figures rising to around 40,000 in the following decade.³

Time and Tide points to a network of women – writers, artists, politicians and other figures in public life – whose advances in the sphere of paid, professional work reflected a transformation in the face of Britain during this period. The material and symbolic value of work for this group of women will be discussed in more detail in Chapter Two. Here, I want to examine the ‘web’ of connections that was both cause and effect of this journal. The figure of the web has proved useful to other critics interested in women’s friendship networks, including sociologist Liz Stanley (whose pioneering work on female friendship and auto/biography was a significant influence during the early stages of research for this book), literary critic Bonnie Kime Scott, and art historian Deborah Cherry.⁴ In a striking and visual way, the web both reveals an array of connections between women that may otherwise be glossed over in an aside, parenthesis or a footnote, and lures the onlooker into speculative contemplation of the possible meanings of these connections. To this end I have generated my own web (Figure 1.1), offering a partial view of a network of women associated with Time and Tide. The view is partial since much more work needs to be done to fully investigate the friendship network of which this journal was both cause and effect. But as a web into which more women of this period can certainly be woven, it represents an important context for approaching the individual friendship pairings that form the substantive focus of this book.

First, Figure 1.1 reveals connections between women associated with Time and Tide who form what might more accurately be described as a composite web of multiple networks or smaller friendship groups. Its irregular appearance should be seen to represent ‘uneven and changing patterns and textures of friendship’ in a fabric of interconnections revealing ‘knots and breaks, slacks and tensions’ over the passage of time.⁵ Using this framework, Cicely Hamilton, Winifred Holtby, E.M. Delafield and Rebecca West ‘can be woven in time and again to places, moments and campaigns’ during the course of a decade or more.⁶ As Directors of the paper, as well as regular contributors, these women form the dense part of the fabric of Time and Tide and were among those who joined Lady Rhondda on annual holidays in the South of France. With Lady Rhondda, Hamilton, Holtby and West were also active in new feminist organizations of the period, including the Six Point Group, which was established in association with Time and Tide in 1921.⁷

For other women associated with the paper, looser or temporary connections can be projected, for example Elizabeth Robins who was one of its founders and a Director until 1923, and Helen Archdale who was the paper’s first editor until 1926. These presences within the web mark temporary periods of affiliation to Time and Tide, but nonetheless demonstrate the substantial commitment of women instrumental to the paper’s development during its early years. The connections of Naomi Mitchison and Stella Benson were also temporary; each published in Time and Tide roughly between the years 1928 to 1933. But these connections were also less strong; as contributors only Benson and Mitchison remained outside Time and Tide’s inner circle of editorial and policy decision-making. The connection of Storm Jameson to the paper (who was not a regular contributor in any period) was even more fragile. But Jameson’s authorship of a book review published in Time and Tide in 1931, and her presence at a public reception given by Time and Tide the same year, shows her to have had a point of connection at this moment in time.⁸

These knots and breaks, slacks and tensions, indicate that Time and Tide was held together by a changing network and, with due attention to this shifting pattern, further analysis of this web reveals the diverse interests around which these women grouped. First, the cluster of links at the top left corner of the web reveals, with the exception of Rebecca West, an older generation of pre-war suffragists (Archdale, Robins, Hamilton) who with Lady Rhondda were key agents during Time and Tide’s infancy. West (also a suffragist) became the youngest member of the paper’s Board of Directors in 1922 and marks Time and Tide’s feminist alliance across pre- and post-war generations. Vera Brittain and Holtby were among a number of new and aspiring authors who were also encouraged by Time and Tide. In 1926 Holtby joined the paper’s Board of Directors, and both she and Brittain were major spokespersons for Equal Rights or ‘Old’ feminism in this decade.⁹

Figure 1.1 Web of Friendship

Christopher St. John (Christabel Marshall) was a friend of Cicely Hamilton and also belongs to a pre-war suffrage generation that adhered to ‘Old’ feminism in the inter-war years. She wrote a regular music column for Time and Tide throughout the 1920s, and later drama criticisms, but this connection also introduces a different set of interests. St John lived with Edy Craig (daughter of the famous actress, Ellen Terry) and ‘Tony’ (Clare) Atwood in Smallhythe, Kent. This ménage a trois, with its commingling of theatrical, feminist and lesbian interests, had further important connections with the most famous lesbian couple of the twentieth century, Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, both regular visitors to Smallhythe in the 1930s.¹⁰ Author of the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (published, prosecuted and banned in 1928), Hall had no direct links with Time and Tide, but women associated with this journal would certainly have felt the effects of The Well trial. According to one commentator on the period, ‘feminists were suspect lesbians axiomatically’ and while Time and Tide condemned the prosecution and banning of Hall’s novel, its attitude towards the book’s treatment of sexuality remained cautious.¹¹

The presence of Virginia Woolf on this web places the Time and Tide network in relation to another important context, literary modernism. An occasional guest at Lady Rhondda’s private and public receptions, Woolf made a few contributions to the paper including two instalments of her extended essay A Room of One’s Own (1929).¹² Other established women of letters (but who otherwise remained outside or on the margins of high modernism) also gave their support to Time and Tide. Among these were Sylvia Lynd and Rose Macaulay who regularly reviewed books for the paper, and E.M. Delafield whose Diary of a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Biographies of Friendship
• 1 Women’s Friendship in Inter-War Britain
• 2 Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby: a ‘Trade in Work and Desire’
• 3 Winifred Holtby and Lady Rhondda: A Romance of Business
• 4 Vera Brittain and Storm Jameson: ‘A Passionate Beckoning’
• 5 Stella Benson and Laura Hutton: Representing the Lesbian Body
• 6 Stella Benson, Naomi Mitchison and Winifred Holtby: A Triadic Model of Friendship and Desire
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Bibliographical Notes
• Bibliography
• Index