Love and Romance in Britain, 1918 - 1970

A. Harris, T. Jones, A. Harris, T. Jones

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137328632
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The new histories of love and romance offered within this edited collection illustrate the many changes, but also the surprising continuities in understandings of love, romance, affection, intimacy and sex from the First World War until the beginning of the Women's Liberation movement.

1

Love and Romance in Interwar British Women’s Autobiography

Barbara Caine

Reflecting, in A Room of One’s Own, on the abandonment and rapture that was excited by the love poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Christina Rosetti, Virginia Woolf suggested that it aroused feelings that were possible before the First World War, but could not be written about after it. Modern poetry was much more difficult: harder to hum or to remember and rarely about love. Had the war itself brought about this change, she wondered? ‘When the guns fired in August 1914, did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other’s eyes that romance was killed?’¹ Had the ugliness and stupidity of the war destroyed the illusion that had inspired Victorian poets ‘to sing so passionately about the coming of their loves’?² Woolf’s suggestion that the war brought an end to romance provides a useful starting point for exploring the interwar autobiographies of British women. For there are indeed many autobiographies that point to the difficulties that women had in feeling, or even contemplating, romance during and immediately after the war, as if they were infected by a kind of emotional paralysis, in which any sense of self and any strong personal desire were relinquished. But the war also produced new kinds of romance, as a sense of love in extremity produced an unprecedented intensity of feeling. As Lynne Pearce suggests, Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth illustrates well the ways in which notions of self-sacrifice and the constant sense of danger served to enhance and intensify romantic love during the war in a way that was not possible in peacetime.³

Woolf’s questioning of the possibility that the war killed romantic love provides an interesting framework for exploring some of the autobiographies of women written in its aftermath. While love, and especially love leading to marriage, was often depicted as the highpoint in their lives by women who came of age and married before the war, this was much less often the case for women of the next generation. Educated middle- and upper-middle-class women, whose adult life began during or just after the war, suggested in their autobiographies that, rather than being something longed for or desired, love and romance were very problematic and involved some anguish over these women’s conflicting desires for work and freedom, on the one hand, and marriage and a family, on the other hand. Both love and romance seem to have been increasingly difficult for many women in these years because of the complex nature of their own desires. Several of them describe their struggles to gain the education that they wanted and the pleasure and fulfilment that came with university life, or with starting work when that education was completed. The very thought of romance brought a conflict between the Victorian and Edwardian conventions with which they had grown up – according to which a woman would joyfully be subsumed into the world and the life of her beloved – and their own strong desire to continue their work and to maintain the independence that went with it. This conflict was expressed well by Dora Black in a letter to Bertrand Russell, written as she sat in the British Museum in 1918 contemplating the depths of her love for him and the contradictions between this and her own sense of herself as a free and modern young woman:

I have so much of the feminine instinct to give & give myself [ … and to] serve and worship that I get ashamed of it, & proud & afraid of being despised – people do despise that part of women nowadays and I think it right for women to fight it because it is the biggest obstacle to their liberty.⁴

And Dora Russell (as she became) subsequently detailed her own struggles to maintain her independence while acceding to Bertrand’s desire for marriage in her autobiography.⁵

The detailed depiction of the emotional lives and conflicts that women like Russell, and Vera Brittain or Storm Jameson offer in their autobiographies point to some significant changes in the writing of autobiography that occurred in the interwar period. Discussions of emotional life, especially love, sexual relationships and marriage, have a very limited place in British autobiography across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Occasionally there is an autobiography, like that of John Stuart Mill, which pays fulsome tribute to a beloved wife who was also an intellectual partner and domestic companion, but the attention that has been afforded to this aspect of Mill’s autobiography serves to demonstrate how rare it was.⁶ All of this changed after the war as more and more women came to write autobiographies, and significant numbers of them focused unprecedented attention on intimate details about their lives. Their discussions sometimes included physical maturation and the onset of menstruation, the ways in which they obtained sexual knowledge and their first sexual encounters, as well as the problems they faced in married life. Woolf noted this change while reading Brittain’s Testament of Youth in 1933, a book that she read ‘with extreme greed’.⁷ She did not much care for Brittain, she noted in her diary,

But her story, told in detail, without reserve, of the war & how she lost her lover and her brother, and dabbled her hands in entrails, & was forever seeing the dead, & eating scraps, & sitting five on one WC, runs rapidly, vividly across my eyes. A very good book of its sort. The new sort, the young anguished sort, that the young write; that I could never write. Nor has anyone written that kind of book before.⁸

Why, she wondered, was there this urgency in the young to write in this way and ‘to stand bare in public’?⁹

Brittain was well aware that she was writing a new kind of autobiography, both in terms of its subject matter and of her treatment of it. In part its novelty consisted in it being a woman’s life in wartime. Initially she had planned to write a novel about the war, but she came to see that this was not possible and that the only way to do so was to write about herself and her own experience. ‘A new type of autobiography was coming into fashion’, she noted, ‘and I might, perhaps, speed its development. I meant to make my story as truthful as history but as readable as fiction, and in it I intended to speak, not for those in high places, but for my own generation of obscure young women’.¹⁰

The minute Brittain decided to write about herself as one of the ‘women who began their war work with such high ideals’ and carried on grimly ‘when that flaming faith had crumbled into the grey ashes of disillusion’,¹¹ it was clear that her book would be a new kind of autobiography in other ways too, particularly in presenting her life story as that of a whole generation. The resulting book deals not only with her activity and experiences of loss during the war, but also with the emergence of her sense of self as a young woman through her intimate relationships with her fiancé, her brother, her network of close friends and with her parents, whose needs defined and limited the scope and range of her activity. Brittain’s sense of identity was linked particularly to the relationships with her fiancé and her brother. In losing them she also lost a sense of herself and hence had to rethink who she now was. In this respect, Brittain exemplifies what many feminist theorists of autobiography have seen as one of the distinctive characteristics of women’s autobiography. Where the dominant feature in canonical male autobiography is its focus on the development or emergence of an autonomous individual whose relationships are incidental to his life, in women’s autobiography the individual is almost always seen as embedded in close relationships and the very subjectivity and sense of self that they depict is relational, struggling often for freedom from the demands that these relationships impose, but always integrally connected to them.¹²

At the same time, as Woolf notes, the particular exposure of self that Britain offers, and her preparedness to talk about the physical intimacies and discomforts of her life as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, to say nothing of discussing her early sexual ignorance or the knowledge of men’s bodies and sex that she gained through her work, also owed something to the new openness about sexual matters that emerged in the 1920s. The increasing prominence of both sexology and depth psychology at this time brought with it a new recognition of the importance of sexuality and a new preparedness to discuss it.¹³ Brittain was one of the group of young women who became involved in the sex reform movement of the 1920s, concerned to critique existing approaches to marriage and to demand new ways of thinking about and arranging sexual relationships. Several of these women wrote autobiographies that explored their own rejection of conventional norms along with their attempts to find new ways to live and order their own intimate and familial lives, including pre-marital sex, non-married unions and semi-detached or open marriages. Feminism, too, was important for many of them who demanded that marital and sexual relationships acknowledge not only women’s equal citizenship, but also their desire for economic and personal independence. The autobiographies of Ethel Mannin, Naomi Mitchison and Russell, as well as Brittain’s Testament of Experience, are cases in point. All of these women fit into the general category of ‘sexual radicals’ amongst the group that Marcus Collins has designated ‘mutualists’ in his book on Modern Love.¹⁴ For the most part, they tended to see their experiments as having an importance beyond their own lives and as offering examples to others concerned with questioning established values and practices. But the sense of social and sexual change that was so evident in literary and artistic circles in the 1920s licensed many other women who were not directly involved in either sex reform or feminism, like Jameson or Stella Bowen, to write about new kinds of relationships, or about the difficulties of combining marriage, domestic responsibilities and the pursuit of their own talents and interests.

Pearce has recently questioned whether the concern with concepts of sexuality and sexual identity that emerged from sexology, psychology and psychoanalysis is compatible with the concept of romance. The discourses of sexuality and romance, she argues, involve such very different traditions and frameworks that they are almost impossible to bring together in a theoretical way. Moreover, one can see empirically that, ‘as writers, sexologists etc. of the fin de siècle grappled ever more frankly with issues of sexuality vis-à-vis subjectivity, so did relationships and especially romantic relationships slip from view’.¹⁵ But while there is clearly some evidence to support Pearce’s view, as Stephen Brooke has recently suggested, there is also a romance of sexuality.¹⁶ For some young women in the 1920s, of whom Russell is a pre-eminent example, the recognition of women’s sexuality was not only necessary for women’s emancipation, but ushered in a new age in which mutual sexual satisfaction took love and pleasure to new heights. ‘We must have freedom and courage to learn if we are to be worth anything as human beings’, she insisted in The Right to be Happy (1927).¹⁷ Sexual relationships often involved an initial struggle, she suggested, but,

when these struggles are surmounted men and women often find they have been but the prelude to a symphony, a preparation for the most vital sex experience of their lives, which bears fruit in a union in which soul and body cry aloud: ‘For this, for this was I born!’¹⁸

The image of sexual ecstasy that Russell evokes here, argues Brooke, echoes those found in the novels of D. H. Lawrence, in Marie Stopes’s odes to the ‘celestial intoxication’ of sex and in the work of popular writers such as Elinor Glyn.¹⁹ But there is scarcely a hint of this kind of sexual pleasure either in Russell’s autobiography or in those of her contemporaries. Russell produced these romantic images of sexual pleasure in the early years of her marriage when open relationships seemed to guarantee both unprecedented personal freedom and happiness. The much more complex picture of that marriage in her autobiography, in which she clearly elaborated some of the sexual difficulties that it involved, was written years later when she was still suffering from the jealousy and bitterness that resulted from her extra-marital relationships. But none of her contemporaries who had shared at least some of her progressive views in the 1920s celebrated the intimate side of their married lives in their autobiographies. The depiction of troubled marriages amongst these women contrasts markedly with the autobiographies of an earlier generation of women, like Beatrice Webb, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Historicizing ‘Modern’ Love and Romance
• 1. Love and Romance in Interwar British Women’s Autobiography
• 2. The Perfect Man: Fatherhood, Masculinity and Romance in Popular Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain
• 3. Love, Sex, Work and Friendship: Northern, Working-Class Men and Sexuality in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
• 4. ‘A Certain Amount of Mush’: Love, Romance, Celluloid and Wax in the Mid-Twentieth Century
• 5. Love Beyond the Frame: Stories of Maternal Love Outside Marriage in the 1950s and 1960s
• 6. Love, Honour and Obey? Romance, Subordination and Marital Subjectivity in Interwar Britain
• 7. Love in Later Life: Old Age, Marriage and Social Research in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain
• 8. ‘The Love of a Pitiable Dog’: Gregariousness, Reciprocity and Altruism in Early Twentieth-Century British Social Psychology
• 9. Love Divine and Love Sublime: The Catholic Marriage Advisory Council, the Marriage Guidance Movement and the State
• 10. Nova 1965–1970: Love, Masculinity and Feminism, but Not as We Know It
• Afterword
• Select Bibliography
• Index