Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Christine Etherington-Wright
Christine Etherington-Wright 2009
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First published 2009 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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ISBN-13: 9780230219922 hardback
ISBN-10: 0230219926 hardback
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Etherington-Wright, Christine, 1950
Gender, professions and discourse : early twentieth century womens
autobiography / Christine Etherington-Wright.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 9780230219922 (alk. paper)
1. Autobiography Women authors. 2. English prose
literature Women authors History and criticism. 3. English prose
literature 20th century History and criticism. 4. Women authors,
English Biography History and criticism. 5. Women and literature Great
Britain History 20th century. 6. Women Great Britain Biography
History and criticism. I. Title.
PR808.W65E84 2011
820.9492072dc22 2008027602
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
This book is dedicated to my husband Barrie
and my two children, Amanda and Paul.
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Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Part One
1 Introduction 3
2 Headmistresses 17
3 Women Doctors 37
6 Women Writers 86
Part Two
9 Silences 143
12 Conclusion 198
Notes 207
Index 235
vii
Illustrations
viii
Acknowledgements
ix
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Part One
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1
Introduction
The ideas that generated this book have had a long gestation. My early
interest was aroused by the literature of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. As a teenager, the novels of Haggard, Conan Doyle,
Stoker, Stevenson, Wells, Kipling and later Wilde, Conrad, Bennett and
Forster filled my shelves. But where were the popular women novelists
of this time? Female novelists such as Elinor Glyn, Bertha Ruck and
many others are not part of the canon in the way that male novelists
are. My interests then extended into the culture of the period and my
quest for womens writing expanded to include their autobiographies.
This too seemed sparsely represented in the print canon when com-
pared with autobiographies written by men. Of course there was
Brittain, often discussed as the representative female from the
Edwardian period and the First World War period. But where were
other womens lives? The history books acknowledged the pioneering
women doctors, the thousands of Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs),
countless Suffragettes, an occasional actress, and so on. It seemed clear
to me, that although men were the journalists and academic gatekeep-
ers of this thread of cultural history, there must be many female auto-
biographies waiting to be uncovered.1 I wanted to hear the women
themselves.
So my project was initially motivated by the desire to explore issues of
identity from what women themselves understood, and not from male
opinion of the time. The drive to write this book has arisen from my
interest in womens autobiography, and in the cultural history of this
period. In particular, I noticed a fundamental under-valuation of the
rich pickings of cultural knowledge contained in these autobiographi-
cal writings. There seemed to be a lack of an imaginative theorising
about what these female autobiographers thought, and about how this
3
4 Gender, Professions and Discourse
mundane and unexceptional grew in the 1920s and 1930s.15 After the
founding of Mass-Observation in 1937, what Raphael Samuel described
as unofficial knowledge became part of mainstream culture.16 The
stage was set for an emergence of a new kind of autobiographical
writing.
This apparent relaxing of the canonical parameters of autobiography
which had hitherto defined autobiography, allowed women to feel that
they could enter into this market. Jane Marcus notes that: unlike epic
poetry, the drama, or the novel, the memoir made no grand claims to
artistic achievement. Consequently working-class men and all women
could write in this genre without threatening male hegemony or
offering claims to competition.17
The increase in ordinary writing, as Samuel argued, expanded the
sources to include the literary productions and artefacts of the less well-
known person and made them available to the historian.18 But for rea-
sons I make clear later, womens autobiography was still marginalised in
any critical research.
During the 1960s and 1970s, autobiographical criticism continued
to suffer from androcentric and narrowly prescribed boundaries.
Indeed; insignificant was the predominant description of female
autobiography. Pascals text acknowledged only Martineau and Webb,
in passing, and Olney had not a single reference to women autobiog-
raphers.19 This gender bias towards female autobiography continued
well into the twentieth century. Jelinek recorded, that Shumaker, in
1954, had acknowledged only three nineteenth century female autobi-
ographies and none from the early twentieth century.20 A.O.J. Cockshut,
J. Goodwin and Clinton Machann all held very narrow and prescriptive
definitions. 21 But attitudes were changing. Howarth in 1969 found
that many definitions of autobiography were limiting, often only
suitable for a social historian, and unsuitable as a basis for critical
evaluation.
Feminist ideas entered strongly into the debates about autobiography.
A spate of writing in the 1970s formulated the notion of studying
womens writing as a separate enterprise and an index of new defined
words appeared in this gynocentric criticism.22 This was essentially a
radical feminist and separatist approach taken up notably by Mary Daly,
Ellen Moers, Patricia Meyer Spacks and Elaine Showalter.23 Feminist
critiques initially concentrated on gendered constraints which included
problems of self-assertion, the female sentence, and the absence of
womens writing.24 It was in the 1980s, when Jelineks groundbreaking
work pulled all these elements together. She identified that the most
Introduction 7
During the late 1980s and the 1990s there has been a growing interest
in photography as a means of autobiography. According to Cosslett,
this interest has contributed to the view: that textuality should be at
the heart of the study of autobiography.34 But in order to examine this
theory, Jo Spence, Liz Stanley, Annette Kuhn, sand J. Stacey all take
examples from their own lives and family albums.35 They are used
within the autobiographies as: a piece of evidence, a clue as material
for interpretation.36 Hitherto, I have found no exploration of the effect
and use of presentation of the body and adornment in the examina-
tion of non-contemporary autobiography. This is an area I intend to
address in Chapter 7.
In the twenty-first century I find it dispiriting that literary critics
such as Mary Evans are still batting against the wearying and largely
unanswerable questions of classification, form and content.37 From the
outset, Evans denigrates autobiography as the: literary equivalent of
gossip an implication that autobiography is based on fictions about the
writer.38 According to Evans:
the consciousness of the period in question will emerge and the need
for reclassification becomes redundant.
Whilst many of the articles and books on the Edwardian period are
excellent, these authors often fall short of a full engagement with the
texts possibilities. By this I mean that the autobiographies are used to
substantiate a theoretical position about form and content, rather than
using the writing as a means of analysing and understanding the men-
tality of the writer and the era. As a result, the problems they may pose
are often avoided altogether, or as Benstock accuses theoretical critics
of acting as interpreters rather than using the writing itself. She argues:
the writing is submitted to the violence of a theory that merely regis-
ters its effects through a sample set of quotations.43 A false homogene-
ity is thus imposed. What close criticism can do is demonstrate the
complexity of the texts and the difference between them.
Benstocks criticism could be levelled at Julie Bush. Concentrating on
upper class womens autobiographies of late Victorian and Edwardian
Britain, Bush found a:
Whilst Bush recognises further possibilities for analysing the texts, like
others before her, she has not undertaken this mode of research
methodology.
I began this brief survey of the path that criticism of autobiography
has taken with a quote that helped to clarify my unease with some
aspects of existing criticism. So it appears apposite to end this section
with a quotation from Tess Cosslett that suggests a useful way forward:
the social, the popular and the academic, the everyday and the
literary.45
For artists and practitioners, social and cultural boundaries were far
more flexible, but would the divide between artists who operated in
private and those that performed in public have a marked difference in
their recording of their experiences? Finally, in Chapter 6, my inquiry
into the women novelists, autobiographies needs a different emphasis.
As wordsmiths, would they exhibit concern for the demands and pres-
entation of truth as given? I intend to investigate the patterning in
their approach to subjects of a highly personal and emotional nature.
As can be deduced from this brief summary, the five chapters develop
from an analysis of lives that vary in significant ways. The different
subjects that are pursued had primacy within each profession, and rose
from the texts themselves and hopefully were not determined by any
inductive design on my part.
In the second part of the book, Chapter 7, Frontispiece Images,
Chapter 8, Prefaces, Forewords and Introductions, and Chapter 9,
Silences, address elements in autobiographical texts which are tradi-
tionally ignored. Chapter 7 asks, Why autobiographers select a specific
image to represent them? and how this idiosyncratic image, that is a
rich source for cultural analysis, affects the reading of the text. I shall
analyse these signs by using methods derived from Roland Barthes.47
Prefaces and Introductions, in tandem with photographs, are powerful
in producing a first impression, and as such need close examination.
The chapter questions whether there is any accord or contrast between
the professions at the margins of their books. The chief aim in Silences
is to find a way in which silence, in its many forms, can be construc-
tively analysed and shown to be as informative as the written word.
Words are the signposts towards an understanding, but if words are
supplemented with an analysis of silences, will a more profound and
accurate account emerge?
Chapter 10, Self and Identity and Chapter 11, Memory and
Accuracy are very closely linked, and build upon the work undertaken
in Chapters 8 and 9. In Self and Identity I want to make a case for the
usefulness of autobiography in historical research. The problematic
concept of histoire de mentalits, initiated by the school of Annales in
France, is germane to my work. Periods of history and culture have
been deemed to have certain characteristic mental structures.48 I want
to examine these autobiographies to ascertain whether there is accord
or discord between different professional subcultures. Given that the
findings from this chapter were assembled from the memories of these
women, it is of prime importance to establish whether memory can be
acknowledged as a reliable and accurate resource. In Chapter 11 I will
Introduction 13
their daughters if they did not marry or work.54 In the late Victorian
period almost one in three of all adult women were single and one in
four would never marry.55 By 1911 this figure had reached a peak of
some 1,330,000 single women.56 In the press they were described as
excess or surplus women.57 The careers open to the middle-class,
teaching, nursing, clerical work and work in the social service were not
well paid, but by 1911 three-quarters of single women were in paid
work. Although middle-class womens aspirations and position had
changed during the decades before 1914, by 1914 few women had
advanced through the gap into the professions although, in principle,
the way was now open.58 The higher professions were mainly barred to
women. There were still only 553 women doctors in Britain in 1912 and
women were excluded from the upper ranks of the civil service, the law,
and accountancy.
On two fronts, education had played a large part in womens bid for
independence. In Britain, there was no secondary school system before
1902. The number of girls schools in 1904/1905 was 89, and by
1913/1914 it had increased to 349.59 It therefore follows that there was
an increased demand for women teachers. But only a minority would go
on to graduate from womens colleges at Oxford, Cambridge and London
universities. This great growth in secondary and higher education paved
the way for professional careers in teaching.
Other, less easily quantifiable changes, lay in the greater freedom of
movement young women had attained. They could go dancing, join
touring and mountaineering clubs, there was mixed bathing, and enter-
tainment had taken on a new medium with 3,500 picture palaces in
existence by 1914.60 This created a surge in consumerism, which both
fuelled womens importance as customers and generated a substantial
number of jobs for them.61 These freedoms were replicated in the chang-
ing fashion. Womens dress was looser and more flowing, hair was
shorter. Once the First World War was in progress, social commentators
were noting wartime changes, and the myth of women enjoying male
vices flourished in wartime popular culture.62
The freedom of the sexes to mix brought the difficult topics of sexual-
ity, illegitimacy and contraception to the fore. Sexual liberation was a
touchy subject, especially the issue of birth control and its implications
for the future of the family and woman as mother. There was some-
thing like a moral panic about birth control. This was exacerbated by
the falling birth rate which, between mid 1870 and 1910, had fallen
nearly 30 per cent.63 Between 19141917, in real terms, the birth rate
had decreased by 200,000 and the illegitimate birth rate had increased
Introduction 15
This study begins with headmistresses who were among some of the
first women to gain professional teaching status. From the 12 head-
mistresses autobiographies examined I have selected four which exem-
plify the concerns of this group; some of which have been the focus of
social historians.1 In these texts their common concerns range from
those of vocation/service, religion, celibacy and spinsterhood, to
teaching methods, curriculum and retirement issues. Hitherto, these
issues have been an under-researched area. My intention is to examine
the effect that institutionalisation has upon the content and style of
their autobiographies, because at times the lives of these professional
and articulate women can appear to be indistinguishable from the
lives of their school. However, these headmistresses do not disappear
into the text; it becomes what Camilla Stivers calls the: construction
of the self through the narrative of others.2 In these texts the other
is the school. This chapter will examine how the restrictions, social,
cultural and professional impinged on these pioneering women. The
work of philosopher and theorist Michel Foucault will be of use
although at times Foucaults ideas can appear to provide more prob-
lems than they solve. For this exploration the notion that: Foucaults
work does not form a system [ ... ] it is a patchwork of studies3 is an
advantage, because as I suggested in the introduction, this analysis
requires a bricolage of theories. Moreover, Foucault suggests that his
theories should be used as a toolbox and that the reader: is of course,
free to make what he will of the book. [The Order of Things] What right
have I to suggest that it should be used in one way rather than
another?4 Therefore, whilst Foucaults writing on discipline is not my
sole resource here, several parts of his study on this will be useful. He
observed that, in a modern society individuals are increasingly bound
17
18 Gender, Professions and Discourse
met in 1874, and by 1894 the Association of Women Teachers had been
formed. Reformers recognised that teacher training would pave the way
for better education, for better salaries, and raise the social and profes-
sional status of this new brand of career-minded teachers. Indeed, these
associations were landmarks in establishing the professional repute and
became instrumental when conditions and pay standardisation, on the
same terms as men, would also become an issue.13 By 1895, there were
53,000 certified teachers, of whom only 29,000 had received two years
training in training colleges, the remainder held an Acting Teachers
Certificate Examination.14
Mixed abilities of staff continued, in part due to the rapid expansion,
and in part due to the demands of the women teachers themselves.
Headmistress Lilian Faithfull described the mixture of teaching abilities,
at her first post, at the Royal Holloway College:
Formed in 1872, the Girls Public Day School Company set up unde-
nominational high schools with the aim of providing a first-class
education in day-schools for girls of all classes. 32 The Church founded
Anglican high schools and endowed high schools were followed by
grammar schools and the Municipal secondary girls schools. 33 The
North London Collegiate School founded by Miss Buss, became the
model for high schools. Cheltenham Ladies College opened in 1854
and was seen to have a similar impact on girls public boarding
schools to that of the North London Collegiate on high schools.
Cheltenham emphasised that in order to remain exclusive and elite
institutions, the clientele were to be daughters of gentlemen. This set
them apart from the more socially diverse High Schools. The curricu-
lum included needlework, but overall was modelled on that of the
boys public schools. For some parents this was too advanced.
Although by 1863, pupils who were entered for Oxford or Cambridge
Local Examinations also studied mathematics, science, Latin and
Greek. 34 Interestingly, after 16 many more girls than boys stayed on
in state secondary education and between 1870 and 1913 university
places tripled. 35
These reforms were seen by some as a challenge to the new imperial-
ism. One focus of attention was female physical deterioration and the
falling birth rate, which were all too easily seen as the fault of higher
education and the opportunities for women to have a professional
career. B.L. Hutchins, a journalist writing in 1912, advanced theories
disputing that: professional advancement [ ... ] will draw women away
from matrimony and motherhood, and lower the average fitness of the
mothers of the race.36 Hutchins collected statistics of married and
unmarried women, self-supporting or not, by age and class to establish
the facts. It emerged that: the demand for Higher Education and wider
opportunity has arisen as a consequence of the restricted prospects of
marriage in the upper class [ ... ] The womens education movement is
being attacked on a priori grounds, and with very little knowledge of the
real facts.37
These objections would inevitably discourage the more timid female.
Faithfull writes:
I think there can be little doubt that indirectly the higher education
of women discouraged marriage in as far as it gave to women an
alternative which had none of the dullness or limitations of home
life, and much of the variety and opportunity for initiative which
would not normally be found in domesticity.38
22 Gender, Professions and Discourse
Burstall in the Record Book of her school registers notes: The Sixth
Form had twenty-one girls; two-thirds of these went on to a university.
More than half of these girls are now married; indeed, our old girls who
go to college marry in greater proportion than those who do not.39 In
a similar vein, Arnold Bennett saw that only improvements for all con-
cerned would accrue from the education of women. In accord with
Burstall he writes that education would fit women as better compan-
ions to men and improve marriage for both sexes.40 He observed: Girls
marry later than they used to marry; therefore men also. I have heard
expressions of wonder that economically independent girls should
marry, not later, but at all.41 Notwithstanding these advantages for
pupils in late Victorian and Edwardian times, the headmistresses of the
1900s1920s were confronted by many issues. The focus in this chap-
ter is not on those issues which were featured in the common press, but
those which appear to have an a priori position in headmistresses
autobiographies.
As girls and as pupils these highly respectable women would have
been tutored in the importance of the feminine virtues of selflessness
and service, and would have been given the expectation that they
would marry. Therefore to pursue an academic role and to pursue a
career where marriage was an impossibility would present a problematic
image, because it was not one of traditional femininity. Early in her
career Faithfull records that: public opinion operated as a strong con-
trolling force.42 To mitigate this, service, destiny and calling became
keywords as strategies which salved their consciences and steered public
opinion away from unfavourable sentiment. Burstall identified her own
and her peers teaching profession as: our calling.43 When appointed
headmistress at Manchester she noted: My service began [ ... ] and was
destined to run to August 1924.44 Similarly, reflecting on her appoint-
ment to Cheltenham, Faithfull writes: There was great dignity and seri-
ousness; and when I was summoned the second time, it was as if I had
entered a church full of silent prayer [ ... ] it seemed to me that I was
ordained to high and holy office, not merely elected to an important
post.45
Their un-ladylike behaviour was ratified by holding ideas of their
careers as a Divine calling; equating service in teaching as service to
God.46 This concern for suitable conduct was always close to the surface
when writing about their ambitions to teach and have professional suc-
cess, and fomented this elevated, moral and religious lexis came into
use only when writing about their ambitions to teach and have
professional success.
Headmistresses 23
act of ambition, but at the same time present her joy in her success, did
not allow for the climactic impact of the dramatic change in the pulse
of her writing. The overwhelming excitement in achieving her ambi-
tion had interfered with her presentation of correct behaviour. But of
equal importance is that this invasion of vitality is only recorded at the
outset of their careers.
If, as Foucault suggested in Discipline and Punish, the emergence of
new organisations leads to an increase in hidden bureaucratic surveil-
lance, then these headmistresses had shrugged this away when record-
ing their remembrances of the outset of their careers. They were able to
situate themselves to a time when they had not succumbed to this
monitoring affect. But in order to write the main body of their autobi-
ographies and refract charges of self-assuredness in their actions, they
adopt and maintain a masculine style which uses the passive voice. As
professional writing aims at an invisibility and anonymity of gender, it
would be a portal through which headmistresses could enter a dis-
course and be accepted. The formal, distilled, authoritative tone, syn-
tax and lexis would mark the writer as professional and objective. In
effect they could assert their competence, and because this style of
writing was so widely used, they (and it) became in a sense less visible
and genderless.
An exception to Burstall, Faithfull and many other headmistresses
is Frances Gray, First Mistress of St Pauls Girls School. While reading
The Spectator in January 1903 she saw an advertisement for a
Headmistress of a new school for girls:
I took it for granted that I was to apply for the post that was
advertised [ ... ] I received letters from friends at Westfield College
urging me to try [ ... ] I needed no urging. [ ... ] I had no premonition
of success or failure; but I had a very strong feeling that I must [ ... ]
make some effort to enter this new field of work. It has always inter-
ested me to observe how many experiences and how many kinds of
experiences may be crowded into one life if we are prepared to accept
and to use every scrap that comes to us.50
isolation because she made herself part of a larger community. She had
escaped being stifled and subsumed.
This is one of many occasions that show Gray as representative of a
minority that had not yielded to the hierarchical observational systems
posited by Foucault.51 Dominant systems cannot exercise total control;
neither can they tailor their systems of control to meet the exact situa-
tion of each person within a group. Foucault noted that hierarchical
mechanisms operate: not by differentiating individuals, but by specify-
ing acts according to a number of general categories.52 Gray was both
inside and outside of her school institution. Thereby, the hierarchical
observation and normalising judgements noted by Foucault impinged
less on Gray.
Her assurance and boldness are a direct result of her energy and self-
possession. In her chapter, The Vocation of the Teacher she raised what
she considered to be an inherent fallacy, that two lives were necessary.
The one: the outer kapelistic [sic] life of drudgery, the other the inner
and cherished life of the spirit.53 For Gray there was no divided mind.
She energetically denied the suggestion often put to teachers that: we
are supposed to act vigorously during term-time in our vocation among
our pupils and to be ourselves when we go on holidays.54 In fact Gray
is one of the few headmistresses that acknowledged that they had
holidays. She wrote about the fullness of a teachers life which she
found: as satisfyingly, in the schoolroom as in any other region to
which his destiny may send him [ ... ] it is a mark from those who are
truly called [ ... ] be wise and seek until you find the work that brings
lasting happiness.55
At this juncture it is worth noting the different attitude of teachers
who worked in small, privately owned establishments. For Amy
Barton, after being awarded her B.A., there was resignation to the fact
that she must teach: Well, there was no choice. One taught or did
nothing. 56 As for it being a calling, neither Barton nor her three
friends wanted this profession. Teach? her friend Bennie wrote in a
letter, Id rather sweep a crossing. Nobody wanted to teach. Another
friend disliked the school so much that she habitually headed her let-
ters Hell. 57 Similarly, Faithfull found the new enthusiasm for teach-
ing careers, as vocational, had been short-lived: our own enthusiasm,
made us eager to get posts and content to keep them for years. All this
has changed now. 58
Management of these schools required rules and regulations and as
such, these mechanisms appear to have had a deleterious effect on the
headmistresses. Responsible for everything under their control, they
26 Gender, Professions and Discourse
tied to the grindstone [ ... ] I see her as a lark in a cage, her wings quiver-
ing to carry her up into the sky and sunlight.72
Isolation through office led, for many, to loneliness. One incident
recorded by Cleeve whereby a young girl physically shakes her shoul-
der to gain her attention when allocating parts in a play initiates
unexpected feelings: If I were to describe how delighted I was about
this, I should expose myself to the charge of sentimental exaggeration.73
She appears disproportionately concerned with this incident; even to
the point of singing the Hallelujah Chorus or: if a street urchin, I
might have turned a surprising number of somersaults [ ... ] as I was
Marion Cleeve, I betook my prim person to the comparative seclusion
of my room, sat down, laughed a good deal and cried a little.74 This is
a clear example of how reined-in her feelings were. The void in Cleeves
life is so raw and emotionally stretched that the slightest show of
affection renders her unstable, and in fact for some, their stoic forbear-
ance brought illness.
Octavia Wilberforce, a doctor writing of her experiences at
Graylingwell psychiatric hospital Chichester, is surprised by the number
of women that had formerly taught: Why should teaching send you
dotty? Continual hard work, no future, no ambitions, bad pay, eh? Its
the inelastic who go off [ ... ] One [ ... ] forty odd, and the most lamenta-
ble creature Ive ever seen, mentally, morally, physically. Harmless but a
wreck. [sic]75
As Wilberforce noted, those who are fragile go to the wall. Foucault
believed that continued observance permitted: an internal, articulated
and detailed control to render visible those who are inside it.76 That is
to say, the external constraints leave their impressions in the soft tissue
of the psyche. At this stage Foucault saw only benefits and that every-
one were similarly treated. But as Anthony Elliott noted: In time
Foucault came to admit that surveillance is not something that settles
upon all persons equally.77 At one end of the scale you have the dotty
teacher, at the other end you find the more robust like Francis Gray.
Gray approved of unified control:
womanhood and the feminine than perhaps some women were able to
accept. This doctrine would cause teachers and headmistresses, in
particular, feelings of guilt, because their personal ambition necessi-
tated the rejection of family life. Stewardship of a high profile girls
school exacted a high price.
It can be seen from the above the intricate pattern of conflicting
standards that these headmistresses had to negotiate. Burstall wrote in
1907:
I had behaved very badly. I had, but I am sure it was the best thing to
do, I was then about thirty. After that-nothing. [sic] Romance seemed
to pass me by in disgust. Then, at last, at long last, I met W.J., but
then it was too late, much too late.101
silence. What is evident from these incidents is that although the male
governors dominate, they cannot exert total control.
Foucault wrote that power is always interactive. He offers the notion
that although the effects of power are described in:
constraint and restriction. In that one quoted place name, the reader
experiences the idea of deliverance and independence. Burstall is more
expansive, she dedicates a chapter to her retirement thus far. She
reflected on the positive nature of the older, educated woman:
when I came to retire from active service did I realise how happy old
age might be. I have never been so happy since childhood. (my italics) as
I have been in these years of freedom, and that is why the brief record
of it may justly be called Autumn Sunshine.116
37
38 Gender, Professions and Discourse
quest or the folk-fairytale. [ ... ] if they are read with careful attention to
form and metaphor.15 She noted a sense of mission, rite de passage, trials
and tribulations, and associated these with the notion of fairy/
folktale.16
My research suggests that the genres employed are wider than those
of the fairy/folktale. It is the fairytale, girls heroic stories and boys
adventure narratives that are appropriated, and are the most impor-
tant and overriding point of interest, because this phenomenon
occurs solely in the autobiographies written by women doctors.
However, as is often the case in brief articles, scant attention is given
to what these young women doctors wrote themselves. Instead situa-
tions such as: institutional obstacles, [ ... ] idea of separate spheres [ ... ]
possessed by a mission are acknowledged without undertaking a close
textual reading to hear the autobiographers themselves.17 Therefore
in this chapter I examine why these narratives were imbued with
such genre-specific conventions and vocabulary, and consider why,
and to what effect, these autobiographers found it necessary to
construct themselves as archetypal, mythical heroines in their
narratives.
Finally, consideration is given to the emotional context, when these
forms of discourse are foregrounded. Of the professions examined in
this book, the doctors give the greatest narrative space to childhood
memories, educational struggles, family and patriarchal approbation,
and male prejudice. It follows that these themes need to be analysed in
some detail, as they tend to be part of the most important experiences.
The autobiographies of Elizabeth Bryson, Gladys Wauchope and Octavia
Wilberforce are the main focus for this chapter, as they are representa-
tive of this cohort of women doctors.
As a starting point, it is useful to outline some tenets of the fairytale
and girls and boys fictional narratives. The fairytale as a bed-time
story has images of the miraculous and the beautiful, operating in a
world of wish-fulfilment and magic events, and usually involves the
gift or removal of some magic spell. There is a sense that anything can
happen and that the ending will be happy. The happy ending under-
pins the sense that tribulations will result in safety and reconciliation.
According to David Luke, Tales are not only variants of each other,
but consist for the most part of combinations and permutations of
certain typical constituent elements.18 Jack Zipes noted that literary
fairytale was: designed both to divert as amusement and instruct ide-
ologically as a means to mold [sic] the inner nature of young people.19
He added that Perraults prose fairytales: can be divided into two
40 Gender, Professions and Discourse
it. I blushed and was silent.44 Bryson sought refuge in the idea of being
possessed by something outside of her control:
This event occurred after the family business had failed and bailiffs had
arrived; a traumatic and pivotal event in any familys life. There is no
preamble to this incident nor is there any aftermath. So the reader is
unaware and unprepared for this. Family life resumes in a small house
in a poorer area and: the memory tunnel becomes sharp, clear and
continuous.48 It is evident that the emotional economy that underpins
Brysons autobiography is disrupted at points of upheaval and uncer-
tainty in two ways. First, the pace and tone of her narrative has changed
from one of evenness and authority to one of brevity and short sen-
tences. Secondly, she has recourse to tunnel imagery which foments a
sense of menace, subversion and foreboding. The bailiffs emerge as
faceless ogres who force the family to undertake a hazardous journey or
44 Gender, Professions and Discourse
I knew where I was going, but I didnt know the way. Now the way
was clear; straight on even to a medical school [ ... my] determined
desire: it was still there, deep down beyond my volition. I had not
chosen the road ... it had chosen me! It was part of the magic.50
I knew now that I had found my road; perhaps my road had found
me. It was indeed my good fortune to be enlightened and brought to
the threshold of wider horizons-to glimpse down a long vista of
knowledge to which there is no end [ ... ] Life had not lost its magic. I
was a child playing with pebbles in a world of wonder.51
As a woman in her early twenties she still believed she was brought to
her path; not withstanding the 12 to 15 years of trials, in the form of
exams; the need for bursaries and struggles to fight against the estab-
lishment. It is an irresolution that betrays the uncertain position in
Women Doctors 45
What was it that drew me up suddenly and said, No, no, no! to
every prospect except Medicine? I began to know a little [ ... ] I wanted
a road that would be hard and use the whole of me all my faculties.
All of me and I was a woman!52
a somewhat subdued tone to say how sorry they all were that
they could not award me the Scholarship that I had undoubtedly
earned. Why? Because I was a Woman! It would require an Act of
Parliament to alter the terms before the award could be made to a
woman.54
I have been like a horse ridden in blinkers and seeing only straight in
front. Although there have been many faults, failures, and mistakes,
I have never been tempted to jib or shy off. [ ... ] I have been like a
Women Doctors 47
rider to the hounds, with my eye always on the line of the hunt,
choosing my fences, and scanning each field as I jumped into it for
the best way to get out and onwards.64
from fairytale and from girls fiction were reassuring, because they
allowed them to present themselves as heroines rather than face stric-
ture for unfeminine aspirations. Also, when stressful or unpleasant
emotional memories came to the fore for these women, some form of
metaphor or imagery was employed to explicate these.
My final area of investigation into the popular fiction utilised by
these would-be doctors is that of how boys tales are commandeered by
some autobiographers. According to Sally Mitchell: The boys books
that girls liked best were historical novels, empire adventure tales, and
(to a lesser extent) sea stories.72 Octavia Wilberforce had recorded in her
autobiography that she enjoyed reading these and it is these boys tales
that appear to have influenced her. Wilberforce, like Bryson and
Wauchope, was brought up to live a genteel life, to serve the family and
to be useful. Unlike them, formal education was not seen as important.
She lacked support from her mother, who exerted restrictive control
and her father cut her out of his will when she persisted in training for
medicine.73 Wilberforces mother involved her in the National Rose
Society and to also be useful over the house keeping.74 She continued
to care for the roses and play golf, and for both pursuits she won tro-
phies, prizes and money. This triggered her mothers resentment and:
When I returned from there [golf fixtures and the Rose Society] I came
to realise I would meet with black disapproval. It worried me.75 This
repressive regime acted as a catalyst to go against these superficial pur-
suits: Though golf helped my self-confidence it was, after all, only a
game and at intervals I felt depressed. [ ... ] I had no desire to tread in my
sisters footsteps [in marriage]. I wanted something else [ ... ] I would like
to mean something in the world. But how?76
Wilberforces constant battle for a worthwhile existence continued to
be detrimental to her health: The constant harrowing at home was
having the effect of turning me in upon myself. [ ... ] I lost weight. [ ... ]
In Victorian times I should probably have been ripe for a decline.
Instead I had to battle on.77 Writer and social reformer Harriet Martineau
had noted that this type of depression, brought on by frustration and
lack of usefulness was not uncommon.78
Wilberforce had two turning-points in her journey towards a medical
career. It is in the first of these, meeting actress and writer Elizabeth
Robins, that the reader encounters Wilberforces change of style. She
became infatuated with Robins who became an ally and, in contrast to
her authoritarian home-life, was supportive emotionally and later
financially. Aged 21 Wilberforce secretly paid for an education at
Roedean, or she would be mocked and life insupportable.79 This
Women Doctors 49
The utter silence filled my spirit with an inner peace [ ... ] Now had
come the time when I felt compelled to decide my future; was I born
to be a bond slave to family forever? I was plainly made in a different
mould from the rest of my family. That I knew [ ... ] I left the beech
wood with an iron determination not to be lazy or cowardly but to
carve out my own career.84
fairytale and boys fiction modes was used. She presented herself as the
heroine overcoming a series of trials and battles over boundaries, dom-
ination and of crushing defeats. Wilberforces narrative style in the first
chapter, A Haphazard Upbringing is unremarkable but engaging in its
credible, matter-of-fact representation of what were many young,
middle-class womens lives. But this tone changed.
Another form of opposition for these would-be doctors focused on
the notion that medical training was unsexing and unfeminine, and
these women jeopardised their marriage prospects. Wilberforce pre-
sented a melodramatic narrative when she described the towering pres-
sure upon her to marry the son of a family friend. In a light-hearted
vein she: laughed till she ached and apologised to her mother for: not
being like the rest of your daughters who have a readiness to fall in love
with rapidity.87 Pressure built and a nursing friend urged her to get
away from the nagging coercion which surrounded me [and] from the
mesmeric tyranny of home.88 What is interesting is that, the further
into retelling of this episode of the mounting pressure she experienced,
her vocabulary and phrasing increased in its melodramatic content.
The affair culminated in a meeting with the young man:
This striking passage raises two areas of interest. To express her extreme
reaction she utilised a melodramatic narrative in the form of a letter to
Elizabeth Robins. Similar to Bryson, italics and exclamation marks draw
attention to her emotions. The robust Boys Own vocabulary of
revolted, staggered, horror, dazed, greedy, craving and shudder run the
range of blood-thirsting narratives, the young mans craving for posses-
sion chimed with the bond-slave element of earlier family life. By any
standards this reaction was extreme and such sentiments could fuel the
Women Doctors 51
Nursing, like teaching, had long been accepted by the public as a suitable
role for women. But unlike headmistresses and teachers, in the early to
mid-nineteenth century, nursing was undertaken largely by poor,
uneducated women who could find no better employment. This was to
change radically as nursing reforms demanded higher standards and
better educated women. Reforms began when Florence Nightingale,
(credited as the founder of the modern nursing profession), took a post
as superintendent of the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in London. In 1854,
with the outbreak of the Crimean War, Nightingale was appointed to
lead a relief mission to Scutari. Within weeks she had overturned the
systems, putting army doctors to shame and reducing the death rate
among the wounded from over 40 per cent to just over 2 per cent. She
returned a national heroine. Money raised for the Nightingale Fund
established the worlds first modern training school for nurses at
Londons St. Thomass Hospital in 1860. By 1907 Nightingale nurses
had revolutionised hospital care throughout the English-speaking
world.1
During the two decades at the end of the century there were many
rival nursing associations and much in-fighting. Summers noted that:
the gallant record of all these bodies during the First World War has
tended to obscure the complex, and not always heroic story of their
origins.2 In 1878 the St Johns Ambulance Association was launched
which became the basis for training thousands of Voluntary Aid
Detachments (VADs) in the First World War, and in 1896 the War Office
finally took action and devised the formation of the Army Nursing
Reserve in March 1897.3 In the last years of the nineteenth century,
war-fever extended to many women who were not working nurses and
54
Nurses and VADs 55
between 19141919, over two and a half million sick and wounded
soldiers were treated in hospitals cared for by 32,000 women military
nurses.16 According to a 1909 circular, the VADs were: not only
intended to plug the gaps between the field ambulance and the base
hospitals, but also to provide supplementary personnel for the
latter.17 Their training was wide ranging with an emphasis on sponta-
neity and inventiveness. These VADs were drawn from a well-educated
class; many were daughters of professional men, merchants, farmers
and tradesmen. Educated at home or in single-sex High Schools run by
unmarried female teachers they were propelled from a life of closeted
comfort and ignorance into a world of men and of violence. But the
other side of the coin is aptly put by VAD Diane Cooper who wrote: I
began scheming to get to the war to nurse [ ... ] Hospital rules and dis-
cipline spelt liberty. I had never been allowed to go out alone on foot.
My every movement at all times of the day must be known at
home.18
Yet it is no surprise that womens involvement in the war was resisted.
Elaine Showalter identified the war as a crisis of masculinity and a trial
of the Victorian and Edwardian internalised masculine ideal.19 However
such a crisis in 19141918 implies stability beforehand, which was obvi-
ously not the case in pre-war Britain. Bourgeois or middle-class patriar-
chal society was already being challenged by suffragists and women
workers. When the call for mobilisation came, women felt they had the
right to serve. Pankhurst had led 30,000 women under the banner; We
demand the right to Serve. May Wedderburn Cannan, poet and
war-worker, was galvanised into action as soon as war was declared
and mobilisation needed: Well it was our war too [ ... ] I can still
remember [ ... ] sorting out call-up telegrams to go to each of our members
[VADs] I rang up my drivers and borrowed cars, called out my volunteer
collectors.20
The objections to women were not only on ideological grounds; ques-
tions of patriotism were raised over the issue of women wearing
military-style uniforms. In point of fact, the concerns raised and fuelled
in the Press, appear to have more to do with male insecurities surround-
ing womens part in the war rather than any female breach of gender
ideologies; especially those where differentiation in dress needed to be
maintained in order to prevent the undermining of the gender social
order.21 Objections were that women who wore uniforms were exagger-
ating their own importance to the war effort, and consequently the role
of women in the national crisis, and that they were attempting to
become like men. According to Susan R. Grayzel, women in uniform
Nurses and VADs 57
were potentially even shameful, by apeing men and the real work of
the war that men performed.22
Every autobiographer in this category mentions in some form the
provoking subject of uniforms and dress. From the middle-class VAD to
the professional nurse arose a widely differing perspective; but from
neither was there the traditional extreme and controversial comments
of the press, which in the main represented the male position.23
Socialite recruits insisted on ornamentation and adaptation because
they were used to made-to-measure.24 Stobart and Dame Katharine
Furze, Commandant in Chief of the VADs found their uniforms gave a
dignified appearance essential to participation in professional life:
eminently practical [ ... ] selected for serviceability in the field [but]
possibly not becoming to good looks.25 To this end nurses were clad in
skirts to their toes [ ... ] a Red Cross over their foreheads, on the front of
their white linen veils.26 The many variations of nurses uniforms at
this time all presented an image of non-sexual, unassailable dignity
and, with some uniforms, a nun-like quality. 27 Russ suggests that the
wearing of garments that elicit compliments furthers mens domi-
nance. But clearly uniform, whether for men or women, is an impor-
tant emblem of status and identity. These were soon to be very minor
issues when set against the conditions that these autobiographers
entered.
Due to the wealth of information available, it makes sense to investi-
gate areas that have not been addressed. This chapter concentrates on
aspects particular to the wartime and particular to their articulation of
nursing experiences in their autobiographies; those of death and sur-
vival and of treating the wounded. Here I want to consider the acute
coping mechanisms deployed by these women in order to find a means
to articulate the horror, disorder and confusion which enveloped them;
and furthermore examine what stimulates their stylistic, narrative pro-
cedures. I intend to discuss how the form of writing and stylistic fea-
tures replicates a mentality endeavouring to make sense of extreme and
alienated conditions. In the quotations used, I have taken pains to
reproduce the layout, which is I believe important, as part of the stylis-
tic convention and, as such, is intrinsic to the meaning. Similarly, the
use of punctuation, especially ellipses and ... ., in the examples used,
are faithfully reproduced.
In spite of the training outlined above, the young women and widows
that flocked to offer their services as VADs and newly qualified nurses
could not have had any thorough preparation for the conditions they
were to face behind the lines. Hitherto, any firsthand experiences of
58 Gender, Professions and Discourse
I wanted to see him; I wanted to see Death. [ ... ] This was my first
meeting with death. It was not so frightening as I had thought it
would be; only the silence awed me. [ ... ] he looked more like a child
than a grown man. [ ... ] immobility of the statue-like figure began
to disturb me. Death is so terribly still, so silent, so remote.31
Although Shilling suggests that: the dying make death real, immedi-
ately present.32 In a similar experience, Mabel Lethbridge aged 16,
whilst still a probationer nurse, recalled her first exposure to death; that
of a child: I removed the sheet and gazed upon the small dead face with
infinite tenderness. Poor pathetic, lonely little thing, and I had been
afraid. [ ... ] locking the door securely behind me. How silly it seemed, as
if the poor dead could escape!33
Lethbridge used calm simple prose and a lightly playful observation
to capture this unknown entity. Both Lethbridge and Farmborough dis-
play a disarming navet and a high degree of cultural shaping. However
these bodies were in morgues and were within Lethbridge and
Farmboroughs boundaries of understanding and knowledge, not
corpses from violent deaths. But young women were to be catapulted
into an unconnected world of mayhem, death and suffering which they
needed to make sense of in order to narrate scenes and emotions beyond
their previous experience and familiar words. For example, when
Lethbridge is faced with her first ward duty for men back from the war:
I was distracted by terror and anguish by all I saw [ ... ] unspeakable
facial disfigurement or terrible head wounds [ ... ] I found myself brought
face to face with war [ ... ] the ugly side of war.34 There was no place for
Nurses and VADs 59
beatific visions and describing the dying as angelic. Faced with horrific
wounds, mangled bodies and painful death they needed language not
only to record, but most importantly to speak to the dying. Death was
no longer hidden and anaesthetised: it became unspeakable.
Stobart for the greater part of her autobiography wrote in a prag-
matic manner. There is a detached, resigned tone to her writing when
she told of her husbands death: He was on his way home to England
when he died, and was buried at sea. There was no wireless in those
days, and I knew nothing of what had happened until the vessel
arrived in England without him. Thus ended the African chapter of
my life.35
When she hears of the death of her son a similar tone is adopted:
In 1918, during the influenza epidemic [ ... ] my younger son suc-
cumbed to the plague in British Columbia. 36 But for neither of these
family deaths was she present. The reader is given the bare details, in
the manner they may have been given to her. However, in the war
zone, her record of the death of an orderly, the wife of a doctor, is
very different:
Here the style reflects the content. She has achieved this by writing in
long sentences, heaping phrase after phrase, in the past continuous,
which builds a vital and pressing quasi-cinematic depiction of a casu-
alty station. Thurstan appears unable to detach herself from the horror.
Unlike Stobart, at times of an emotional hiatus, her professional
demeanour has been overridden. From these treatments of a similar
scene, the difficulties encountered by the autobiographers to find a
means of surviving such emotional catastrophes are evident. For me,
these are key elements and are illustrative of part of the overall question
of the different mechanisms, boundaries and stylistics that are deployed
to transcribe these horrific events.
Nurse Mary Borden, in contrast to the nurses and VADs whose style
change according to the emotional input, conveyed her memories in a
flat monotone of relentless images. She evoked the senses of sight and
smell in a potent manner:
All these sense images and flat style of narration suggest that despite
Bordens attempted control and intention to produce a distanced style,
her discourse escaped unconsciously to reveal a desperate coping
mechanism in a hostile environment. In her reflective mode, a surreal
imagery was kindled. The patterning of juxtaposing conventional
imagery with the unpredictable continued throughout her narrative.
Her topsy-turvy reasoning clearly established the mayhem and shock
of losing prescribed boundaries of behaviour where nothing made
sense.
Bordens unemotional and unsentimental depictions of her daily
routine accrue more of this strange coinage:
be pushed out of the way. We throw them on the floor they belong
to no one and are of no interest to anyone-and drink our cocoa. The
cocoa tastes very good. It is part of the routine.43
There are no men here, so why should I be a woman? There are heads
and knees and mangled testicles. There are chests with holes as big as
your fist, and pulpy thighs, shapeless; and stumps where legs once
were fastened. There are eyes eyes of sick dogs, sick cats, blind eyes,
eyes of delirium; and mouths that cannot articulate; and parts of
faces the nose gone, or the jaw. There are these things, but no men;
so how could I be a woman here and not die of it? Sometimes sud-
denly a smile flickers on a pillow, white, blinding, burning, and I die
of it. I feel myself dying again. It is impossible to be a woman here.
One must be dead.
Certainly they were men once. But now they are no longer men ... I
am a ghost woman.44
display a need to do more than just describe events. But the problem for
them arises in their uncertainty of presentation in style, vocabulary
and sense of boundary. Yet all engender vicarious emotions in the
reader. This provokes a number of questions about the conflict between
form and content, and more specifically, about seeking a language to
articulate the unmentionable, control of the subject, presentation, and
emotional economy. For the moment, however, it is important to con-
sider aspects of repetition and the different ways that it occurs in these
autobiographies.
Free from the existing norms of life in Britain, and by incremental
stages, the new rhythmic tempo of their world became internalised.
The increasing familiarity with the sounds of war and death was central
to the transformation of these young women. They all mention repeti-
tive sounds of one kind or another. Thurstan recalled the bombard-
ments: the cannon never ceased booming [ ... ] In time, one gets so
accustomed to cannon that one hardly hears it, but I had not arrived at
that stage then: this was my baptism.46 Later she referred to it as the,
continual music of the cannon and the steady tramp of feet marching
past.47 Human sounds also became habitual. Farmborough noted: It is,
however, astonishing how quickly even a raw recruit can grow accus-
tomed, though never hardened, to the sight and sound of constant
suffering.48
This rhythmic patterning was internalised; it was produced in
their manner of speech. One of Farmboroughs duties which caused
intense anxiety was to decide which of the wounded cases were
hopeless. As readers we can only begin to imagine: What it cost to
turn away without aiding him, I cannot describe, but we could not
waste time and material on hopeless cases, and there were so many
others ... waiting ... waiting ... waiting.49
Here not only is the sense of hopelessness magnified in the repetition
but the sense is given of the experience churning round and round in
her mind. After a particularly gruesome onslaught Stobart wrote: dead
men at every turn men dead from hunger, cold, fatigue, and sorrow.
With the dead men the pathos lay, not in their deadness we shall all
be dead some day.50 She introduced a mesmeric quality with this repeti-
tion of dead, dead men and its inversion men dead. The deliberate
piling-up of the same detail mimics the repeated horror of men dying
and continuing to die. Then as if replicating a lull, the emotional impact
of this juggernaut of death ceased with the pragmatic: we shall all be
dead some day. It is as if to state the obvious provided her with a firm
hold in reality. Through the recycling of words an alliance between
64 Gender, Professions and Discourse
Annas face was stony, quite expressionless, and while she worked,
the same words came from her lips every few moments. Its nothing!
Its nothing! My dear. My dear. Quickly, quickly! Suddenly, with a
shock I realise that I, too, have been repeating similar words, repeat-
ing them at intervals when the groans and cries of my patient have
been too heart-rending.51
I knew what was wrong with me. It was my love for my Red Cross
work was slowly fading; I was becoming sick of wounds, illness, dirt
and filth. That was the dreadful truth, and I had to face it [ ... ] All had
combined to unnerve me. I felt deeply ashamed to think that I was
growing tired of my work; where had my passionate enthusiasm
gone? And my vows? Sick at heart, I sat many long minutes a prey to
dejection and grievous reflection.60
She recognised the need for time to recover as the horror set in. As the
inexhaustible round of caring ceased, many nurses were left with a void.
As carers, these women understood the necessity of giving themselves
space to recover. Cannan understood her own and her colleagues stress:
What one needs most in shock and grief is time. Losing ones world one
still wanders in it, a ghost.61 There is a sense of bereavement in the use
of shock and grief, not only for the dead, but for their own losses as
individuals, both spiritually and emotionally:
Now, for me, the war is over and my Red Cross work is finished. I
cannot express the dreadful emptiness which has come into my life
[Anna] found me weeping one day; I could not tell her why, because
I did not know. She said it was reaction but I knew it was something
deeper than that.62
How can I describe ... I feel as though I have been caught in a mighty
whirlpool, battered, buffeted, and yet ... I am still myself, still able to
Nurses and VADs 67
walk, talk, eat and sleep. It is astounding how much a human being
can endure without any outward sign of having been broken up into
pieces.64
70
Artists and Practitioners 71
McCarthy cast her father as life itself. In the half-dozen pages devoted
almost unreservedly to their relationship she attached epithets to him,
consistent with sentiments of adoration: he was Athenian like the men
Artists and Practitioners 73
of Athens in his tastes.15 He was a figure with whom she was entirely
simpatico. This idolised association placed and associated her father in
the context of a classical and pastoral landscape: How peaceful it is: an
oasis of leisured and ordered life, of planted trees, gardens and pleasant
walks. Cheltenham, the heart of England! pulsing [sic] so gently that
life there seems like a tableau rather than a pageant, not moving but
enduring.16
McCarthy was aware that this relationship was unusual: The rest of
the family thought us queer, and queer we undoubtedly were; though
at the time everything my father did seemed natural to me.17 Her
unquestioning allegiance infiltrated all aspects of her life. After an
incident at school, in which she was caned, he takes her side and
decided: No more school for you, my girl. I will teach you myself.18
Despite huge omissions in her studies she had no regrets and was grate-
ful to my father [ ... ] to have been both ruled and loved.19 It is not hard
to imagine that this ruled and loved, from such a charismatic parent,
would have had far-reaching affects over a young child and a young
adult, especially one who appeared his soul mate. This all- embracing
relationship: fills the canvas of my memory of the next three years20
and continued until, with his backing, she began her training as an
actress.
In like manner, cross-dresser Vesta Tilley had a close bond with her
father, Harry Ball. There is strong evidence in her autobiography of
the direct leverage he had over her life for many years. From the age
of three she used to accompany him to the Variety Hall where he
performed, and where he soon became a manager. Modern music hall
was arriving and encouraged by her father, who had composed a
medley of songs for her first performance, she began her stage career.
She remembered: my father carrying me to the side of the stage, [sic]
straightened my little skirts.21 This memory shows that her father
appeared to be fulfilling both the fathers and mothers role. Some
years later she recorded, how one night in her bedroom she dons her
fathers hat and overcoat and attempted to sing a song. Unbeknown
to her, her father observed this and suggested: That was quite good.
Would you like to have a suit of boys clothes for one of your songs?22
From her tone, it appears that her father, an impresario and theatre
manager, saw nothing odd in this. As a family steeped in theatre, this
was simply a cross-dressing variety act. Tilley recorded that she was
delighted: I felt I could express myself better if I was dressed as a
boy.23 It was masked as a boy that she continued to perform, and
found fame.
74 Gender, Professions and Discourse
From the time I was fifteen when I started I had no interest outside
the theatre. It completely filled my life. I dont remember many
young men admirers; I didnt seem to have time for them. I would
break any appointment I had, without hesitation if it clashed with
my job [ ... ] I loved it more than anything else. I cant conceive of life
without acting [ ... ] you give up everything for it.39
she received a death threat and was pursued by a stalker, she was again
assisted by friends. At such times the reader would expect to find her
husband of major importance. It is not until much later in her text,
when she is no longer writing about her career, that it became obvious
that there must have been a divorce.
A similar gloss over personal trouble was used by Maude White, the
composer, pianist and teacher. Whilst touring abroad she mentioned:
[I] had rather a nasty little break-down.45 To deflect attention from this
there follows a two page description of a gentleman traveller and his
suggestions of places to visit and stay at. McCarthy noted: Sorrows too
fall heavily upon me. A dearly-loved brother dies. Turmoil of war.[sic]
Asquith falls.46 These compressed deliveries acted as emotional shutters
when sensitive upheaval occurred during their careers. Short and
incomplete sentences spurn personal and world events in short shrift.
When these performers wrote about their lives prior to their careers, it
can be seen that they used a fulsome, energetic and flowing style. In the
career period of their lives, it is no longer a linear recording with a spec-
trum of emotion and experiences. It becomes a prosaic record which
moves from play to play or composition to composition. Family, close
friends, personal experiences, emotions or tragedies are omitted or
glossed over. It is worth mentioning at this juncture that this does not
obtain for women painters, and this contrast will be the subject of a
discussion below.
There are two points at issue here. One is the nature of self-disclosure,
and the other the strict boundary between the notion of womanly and
unwomanly. This part of their autobiography that deals with their
careers is ordered differently. They are a record of their public achieve-
ments which are established in the public domain, in which they want
to appear competent, in control and professional. More than in any
other area of their lives, what they wrote can be proved or disproved,
and this censure could have had an inhibiting affect. Their restraint
makes the language dry, and furthermore, the themes are curtailed to
those connected with their profession. All their emotional energy
flowed into their chosen profession, leaving a vacuum that they were
apparently unaware of at the time. Thus the autobiography atrophies in
emotion and becomes a biography of the theatre, concert hall and the
participants. This reigned-in, emotional economy is symptomatic of
self-set boundaries and the imagined boundaries of public life along
with its association with masculinity.
With these autobiographies in question, the accepted barriers
between male/female, public/private becomes ill-defined. This usually
Artists and Practitioners 79
signals a change in the balance between their career and private life.
When Irene Vanbrugh returns to the tale of her proposal she noted
that; it was above a year before she allowed an announcement to be
made: [not] till the end of the run of the play.47 Having reached
30 years of age, many women would fear remaining a spinster. But fly-
ing in the face of convention, it transpired that due to further commit-
ments on Irenes part, the marriage was delayed for several years. Such
confident and challenging behaviour disavowed the social assumption
that all women aspire to marriage. There is no evidence of remorse.
Vanbrughs highly focused behaviour placed personal needs a very
poor second to achieving public accolade and the enhancement of her
career.
In the first two parts of these tripartite-structured autobiographies,
the first section showed the father as the prime influence and object of
devotion, and the second, which concentrated on the career, ignored
contemporary feminine aspirations and showed unashamed commit-
ment to their careers. In the final section of this autobiographical struc-
ture they return to concentrate on their private life as their careers were
either over or relegated to secondary importance. The most striking of
these changes was the return to a need for patriarchal control. The
influence moved indicating transference of devotion from father to
husband which was not uncommon within the artistic profession. Also
in the re-telling the style and tone is reminiscent of that displayed in
the first section of the autobiography.
In 1918 McCarthy met Dr Keeble, an Oxford don. They talked and
found they had a lot in common: I brightened up. He brightened up [ ... ]
He knew the poets and loved poetry. So did I. We talked the whole
evening.48 She returned to London with little thought of marriage when
all of a sudden, I began to wish he would [ask her to marry]. Within a
week he did. And I promised to marry him.49 There are exuberant
minutiae on house building, the planning and: five years digging our-
selves in in [sic] a garden.50 Her second marriage heralded the return of
the happiness and safety she enjoyed as a child: a moment that will
remain with me all my life; it showed me beauty such as I had never
seen before.51 What becomes apparent and needs to be noted here is
that her career had ceased to be predominant, and the narrative style of
her writing replicates the pre-career period of her life.
The pastoral bliss of her childhood was replicated. Her new husband
created the safety and a role similar to that of her father. Tellingly,
McCarthy called her husband my Controller. The father/child axis
was in place: Now, my dear, says my Controller, youve talked
80 Gender, Professions and Discourse
quite enough: drink your cocoa; its time for you to be in bed! 52 There
directly follows a flashback to her father, who has not been mentioned
in some 30 years of her life. A lengthy poetic description of the coun-
tryside leads unswervingly to memories of his restlessness when he
would say: Come on Lillah, lets be off, and we would go [ ... ] I used
to hope that we would go on for ever.53 It appears that in one sense
they have. Finding herself totally in love, to the exclusion of all others
(similar to that with her fathers) love for me and mine for him made
me oblivious of all else.54 Her earlier energy and vitality once again
become transparent in her writing. His leverage was still present.
McCarthys descriptions of her father and later, her second husband,
had drawn parallels in their interests. Both were enriched by poetry
and nature, and both were romantics. At both periods of her life she is
at home, in her private womanly sphere. However this is not particular
to McCarthy.
Liza Lehmann, composer and singer experienced, a not dissimilar,
liberating rupture, but her voicing of it is more effusive. The narrative
of her early singing career is blithe and genial; anecdotes abound
about other performers, and there are a few personal details of her
young life. She lived in a: charming house with a fine studio, where I
lived until I abandoned my career as a singer.55 At this point of change
in her life she reminded herself that: this is a human document and
by implication truthful.56 After a spell of illness exhaustion followed
by flu and the idea that, her nervous nature made her unsuitable for
this profession she was: half inclined to give it up [ ... ] and whilst I
hesitated on the brink, Fate took the matter out of my hands, for I met
my future husband and when we married I retired into private life
and abandoned my career without a sigh of regret.57
No longer in the public domain, Lehmann retracts into the female
private sphere where her creative energies flow: after my marriage a
curious thing happened. All the intense longing to compose music,
which I had for so long felt and which had been practically repressed
for years, now found vent.58 It appears that, because she was no longer
engaged in public performance with all her energy going outwards,
she had mental and physical space to compose music, which is intrin-
sically a private activity. But even this ceases with the birth of her
sons: I was far more wrapped up in living poems than in my art [ ... ]
and the love of my children became the very mainspring of my
existence.59 Womanly tasks of home-making, love and childcare pro-
vide a different form of creative outlet within the private sphere. Her
Artists and Practitioners 81
depression she noted: Spring-time came and life seemed worth living
after all.65 The language here has a figurative romanticism in its use of
metaphor, and nature is frequently used to echo her moods. Its poetic
simplicity captures the emotion and the easy renewal of the young.
Canziani does not shy away from telling of her mothers illness and
death, but intersperses newspaper cuttings with her own involvement.
This is the first real reference to her mother. An artist of renown, her
mother: struggled to finish her last picture [ I ] supported her with cush-
ions in a chair to enable her to work.66 With touching delicacy, Canziani
tells how she used a wheel-chair to take her mother to the gallery for the
last time. She continued:
was recognised and lauded. Whilst their art was produced from the
world at large, this art entered the public arena, but the artists them-
selves could remain anonymous and private. Moreover, their art on
canvas, musical score or sculpture, is a concrete and lasting testimony
to their talent. This was not so for the public performers whose art had
the impermanence of each performance and only retained in public
memory.
It is this difference between artists who perform in public, and art-
ists whose work ends up in the public domain, that affirms how
boundaries, whether they are physical or psychological, affect the
style, tone and content of these women autobiographers. Public per-
formance artists were bound by the eye of society, in the early twen-
tieth century. This initiated a power nexus which could undermine
their nerve and self-assurance. But for artists working in private, their
anonymous, bohemian or itinerate arena allowed them physical and
mental freedom.
6
Women Writers
In this chapter the autobiographies of women who wrote for a living are
examined. These autobiographies of professional wordsmiths will inev-
itably be qualitively different from autobiographies of amateurs in the
field, and they raise interesting issues about the interrelation of truth,
fact and fiction. These women novelists who were published in the
period 1900 onwards participated at a time of great literary change. In
a brief overview of the writing scene during the fin de sicle and
Edwardian periods it is clear that, between the decline of the three-
volume novel in 1895 and the outbreak of the First World War, fiction
was the most important section of the leisure industry.1 The develop-
ment of a mass reading public increased the demand for books and
made the Edwardian period a time of unprecedented literary activity.
This was due, in part, to the cheaper price of a novel as it was no longer
considered a luxury, and in part, to its size, as it was smaller and could
be read in many places.2
New genres were in the process of formation along with different sets
of literary conventions. Although Edwardianism was different from
modernism, it was never the less radical. Modernism reconstructed the
past and asserted a new identity. Edwardianism was thought to favour
continuity and tradition, but the fiction often belies this. Many novels
view change as essential, for example, H.G. Wellss Tono-Bungay (1909)
The New Machiavelli (1911), and Arnold Bennetts Clayhanger (1910).
There was an influx of women writers (as this chapter attests) and it was
new for women to be the central subjects of fiction. A striking number
of women topped the bestseller lists in popular romance and childrens
fiction; Marie Corelli, Baroness Orczy, Florence Barclay, Elinor Glyn
among others.3 The most commercially successful Edwardian adapta-
tion of the Ruritania romantic genre was Elinor Glyns Three Weeks
86
Women Writers 87
emotional and physical extremes. The most obvious of these was the
need for a livelihood. Berta Ruck and H.M. Swanwick acknowledged
that, it was obvious that all of us would have to earn a living as soon
as possible.12 Swanwick obtained unsatisfying employment: For a
good many years, what ever work I did was scrappy [ ... ] although I was
not without cravings for a profession.13 She recalled, reporting lec-
tures at Cambridge [ ... ] when the Manchester Guardian employed me for
descriptives .14 Ruck began her employment, illustrating books for
children,15 and Orczy wrote short, sensational stuff for magazines,16
For Storm Jameson, her academic education won her her first opportu-
nity to work in a publishers office.17 She then set about publishing her
thesis as a serious work on European drama and received mixed
reviews.18
However, Glyn and Humphreys had been published writers before
experiencing financial embarrassment after marriage. For Rita, Mrs
Desmond Humphreys, a broken engagement, instigated by her parents
made her realise her need for money, independence and romance: I
determined I would write something worthy of the effort; would achieve
independence, and show that I could support myself.19 Furthermore,
for Humphreys: literature must mean a livelihood as well as
inclination!20 Netta Syrett and Baroness Orczy did not mention the
need for a livelihood. Their motivation was to improve upon the gen-
eral standard of novels already in print. Syrett, the eldest of ten chil-
dren, became a teacher and wrote plays for children. But after reading,
one after the other, a number of novels dealing with the terribly
restricted life led by women whose youth coincided with mine, I began
to think a counterblast to this picture might conceivably be due.21 This
counterblast arrived in the form of feminist fiction with a strong edge
of sensationalism.22 In point of fact there was a strong emergence of
new themes at this time, especially those that focused on Edwardian
heroines who were doctors, nurses, teachers, journalists and so on.23
Orczys motivation, in the first instance, arose from her fathers finan-
cial situation.24 Later in her autobiography she ascribed her motivation
as her desire to administer a stiff corrective to extant fiction writers:
People who come from the wilds of Derbyshire, who know nothing of
life. Orczy, on the other hand had: studied in art and music, history
and drama, [so] why shouldnt I write.25
Elinor Glyn came from a comfortable upper-middle-class background.
She described herself as: almost the first society woman to become a
novelist, and this was an innovation not well looked upon either by my
friends, or by the general body of critics of that date.26 According to
90 Gender, Professions and Discourse
Glyn, she had led an agreeable life, went to amusing house-parties, and
wintered in Cannes or Monte Carlo or Rome.27 What she had not real-
ised was how profligate her husband Clayton was.28 Clayton overspent,
gambled and mortgaged the property and finally, had the shocking bad
luck to lose over 10,000!29 He saw his heart problems as the answer.
Instead of obeying medical advice, he attempted to foreshorten his life
by excesses, and live on capital: After that the deluge!30 Unfortunately
he lived seven years longer than he had planned in spite of his: categor-
ical refusal to undertake treatments [ ... ] to stop smoking a dozen strong
cigars in a day.31
Glyns answer to the burgeoning financial crisis was more practi-
cal. By 1911 there was no choice other than to increase her writing
output and claim substantial advances for her novels to prevent
bankruptcy. The Reason Why was a resounding success but subse-
quent novels starting with Halcyone [sic] were failures. She recorded:
As my only conscious object, by this time, was to make enough
money to keep myself and all the family in comfort, and pay off
Claytons debts, I am afraid that this experience did not tend to
improve my literary style. 32
Glyn was a total romantic. She felt that her creative talent became
compromised when faced with practical necessities. She was reluctant
to face the harsher side of life and found the fundamentals of every-
day survival destructive to her creative powers: I refused to remem-
ber the sufferings of millions [ ... ] who starved in the towns to
maintain Englands wealth, and saw only the wonderful prosperity. 33
She needed to romanticise life and ignore unpleasantness in order to
write. What is clear is that most of the low-brow writers did not have
an all-consuming desire to write. Practical imperatives were part of
the driving force for these women to become writers. By contrast, a
high-brow writer like Jameson believed that she would be published,
and she supplemented her income until that time writing articles,
working in a publishers office and teaching working women
literature. 34
This leads to the question of the influence and presentation of the
relationship between the emotions and the body. Conventional wis-
dom at the time would have upheld the Western tradition that privi-
leged mind over body. But illustrations from these writers of this period
appear to challenge this theory of writing and should encourage us to
reassess the ideas of lcriture fminine as exemplified by Cixous and
Irigaray. Cixous wrote that the body rather than the mind has been
marginalized in traditional literary histories. Their idea of Writing the
Women Writers 91
body or letting the body be heard are clearly attempts to refute the
sense of writing as a strictly mental activity. Cixous and Irigaray
developed the idea of lcriture fminine which challenged these
traditional notions by refusing to accept this separation. Cixouss The
Laugh of the Medusa (1975) developed the theme of the fluid and less
constrained experiential nature of womens writing.35 This has some
potential for my analysis. Examination of the wordsmiths autobiogra-
phies indicates that what makes them hang together is the powerful
case they make, for the notion that the body and mind are in fact
interconnected.
Illness, death, love, pregnancy and birth can all be linked to intensi-
fied artistic peaks of productivity. For Elinor Glyn this was a recurring
rite. After the birth of her second daughter she contracted rheumatic
fever and was expected to die. She recorded that in: a fit of rebellion
against the idea of dying young, to which I had hitherto been quite
resigned, and had, in fact, cherished as being rather touching and
romantic! I determined that whatever followed [ ... ] I should write a
book.36
Re-reading her journals, she found them so amusing that she decided
to make them into a book: No one imagined that I could be serious
when I announced that I would write a book, but the poor invalid had
to be humoured.37 This near death experience resulted in The Visits of
Elizabeth published in 1900. Again in 1902 following a fall when div-
ing in Egypt, Glyn was seriously ill. The pain was so intense that she
was given morphia intermittently for months. During her fitful recov-
ery: I was filled with an impulse to write, and the idea of the story
came to me [ ... ] which I called The Reflections of Ambrosine.38 In each
of these instances, illness and near death experiences became a crea-
tive discourse for survival in which her suffering generated a positive
and heightened productivity. The idea as writing the body particularly
arises with these wordsmiths when they are describing a psychologi-
cal upset. Love affairs, whether forbidden or unrequited, engender
high points of creativity. Humphreys broken engagement (men-
tioned earlier) brought on a serious illness from which she might have
died. Sent to Scotland, she was: determined [to] write something
worthy.39 Amidst Humphreys battle for physical and mental health,
Dame Durden was written and published. In point of fact Humphreys
did marvel how, with such handicaps, as she saw it, a writer, especially
a woman writer, coped. Her suggestion was to keep the: brain in
compartments [ ... ] not an easy matter. When to this is added a
measure of personal unhappiness, money troubles, domestic storms, it
92 Gender, Professions and Discourse
the link to her experience ten years earlier, in which the reproduc-
tive organs had an impact on her writing powers. It appears that
whether the reproductive body is useful and productive or useless
and removed, it was held by Jameson to have a direct influence on
the creativity of the mind. In this notion, the fertility and creative
production are focused in dialectical opposition, and to the detri-
ment of any imaginativeness or originality. This example draws me
to formulate the notion that the binary forces of negative/positive
are operative. Similar to the examples above it appears that, when
the body is negative, that is suffering from love, illness, and near
death experience the mind is positive with heightened activity.
Writing is of course a form of production. But when the body is
positive, that is being creative in its reproductive function,
intellectual creativity waned.
Having established a connection between the mind and body at an
inspirational, creative level for these writers, it seems plausible to
extend the attention to the mind/body paradigm in order to see how
this influenced the content of their fiction writing. I have already
suggested the majority of these women novelists in this survey wrote
for a low-brow market. It is well documented in numerous biogra-
phies, biographical dictionaries, anthologies, that the majority of
these writers have called upon personal experience and known events.
Due to the intrinsic romanticism that many of these writers have
exhibited, personal experience influenced them in three distinct
manners.
Let us now turn to more specific textual characteristics. Firstly, the
unconscious recycling of real-life experiences: secondly, the deliber-
ate avoidance of personal exposure: and thirdly, the opportunistic
deployment of personal experience as a sort of copy. Syrett, writer of
plays, novels and fairy stories was unaware how much of her life was
the material for her work until she wrote her autobiography: the fact
is that in my earlier books I have made more use of personal experi-
ences than I quite realised when I undertook this backward glance.45
To gauge to what extent this took place is difficult because in her
autobiography she openly stated: Much of the past I have no inten-
tion of unravelling at all, in spite of the modern craze for frank-
ness .46 For Orczy her personal life had a more discreet and neutral
bearing on her fictional writing. She clearly affirmed that her choice
to write historical romance stemmed from her reclusive nature and a
fascination with history: I never really cared for social life I [sic]
94 Gender, Professions and Discourse
didnt find that modern thought and modern views of life attracted
me sufficiently to place my romantic stories in the setting of today.47
This aversion to contemporary times, and her desire for her romances
to have historical accuracy, did not necessitate drawing on personal
experiences.
Indeed, this avoidance of the deeply personal was carried through
to her autobiography, where highly emotional areas were not
revealed. Other than to tell us of the supreme happiness she has had
from her marriage the only details of this marriage that Orczy
provided were:
I can only thank God on my knees [ ... ] It was during that time that
my life was turned from darkness into light [ ... ] that I met the man
who from that day became and remained all the world to me. The
subject is secret and sacred to me so I will not speak of it except to say
this [ ... ] My marriage was for close on half a century one of perfect
happiness and understanding, of perfect friendship and communion
of thought.48
In like manner the First World War was a closed subject: Those terri-
ble years 191418, on which I cannot bear to dwell in thought even
after all this time, were as far as my lifes work was concerned very
fruitful for me.49 Neither Syrett nor Orczy had consciously used pri-
vate thoughts and affairs in their work. Syrett was frankly surprised
that her life had seeped into her fiction. This could also be true for
Orczy but, due to her withdrawn existence and silence in her autobi-
ography it would be difficult to make connections. These aspects of
silence are an important theme and will be examined in a later
chapter.
Writers like Humphreys, Glyn and Jameson consciously drew upon
their lives as subject matter. Humphreys found that her fictional repre-
sentation of painful experiences had been cathartic and had obviated a
need to include them in her autobiography. She wrote: the first years of
my marriage are the most difficult to endure. What they meant to me
may have been betrayed by my books. [Dians Kiss, Saba Macdonald, and
The Grandmothers.] I cannot describe them here.50 Yet Glyn, a consum-
mate romantic, robustly recycled her own disappointing experiences in
her fiction. I have written above that part of her driving force as a nov-
elist was to earn money; but I would suggest that it was important for
her also to explore her disappointments, especially the lack of romance
in her marriage.
Women Writers 95
Glyn lays bare in her autobiography various snubs from Clayton. How
a friend of his had made a pass at her and had kissed her. She told
Clayton whose reaction: No! Did he? Dear old Bob! and he continued
to tie his tie.51 Similarly a few years later in Switzerland, she was again
spurned by Clayton: The setting was ideally romantic, but Clayton
only laughed at my spring fancies [ ... ] I felt much aggrieved at his
want of sympathy, and wrote detailed descriptions of love-scenes with
an imaginary lover in this idyllic setting.52
At this time Glyn bought a tiger skin (which caused her to be immor-
talised in rhyme).53 She sensually draped herself: caressed its fur, look-
ing, I imagine, much as my caricaturists have portrayed me ever since.
Instead of being impressed with my charms Clayton laughed so heartily
at me I was snubbed.54 She claimed that: my romance, I realised, was
over, after only two years of marriage.55 Yet her unrequited emotions
acted as a catalyst to write and to fill the demonstrative void in her life.
Ten years later these incidents were re-lived in Three Weeks, her most
famous novel. Glyn mused: Perhaps if I had really had a lover there I
could not have written all my wild imagination pictured in my disap-
pointed soul.56 Later, in her autobiography she records a measure of
contentment from these emanations.
practice as a writer both in her fiction and for her autobiography. She
recalled from a note in the margin of a notebook that:
But she was at pains to point out that she did not leave out events:
humiliating to me or try to: soften my own follies, failures, and the
atrocious flaws in my character. 59 Similar to Glyn, they were an
attempt to lay to rest her own painful memories but, unlike Glyn,
they were not embellished into an escapism or romantic idealism.
For example, in Glyn and Humphreys et al., fact and fiction were
often confused, inflated and conflated; in Jameson they were woven
closely together. To illustrate this it is necessary to undertake a close
reading of a specific episode in None Turn Back (1933) and to look
closely at Jamesons use of the same source material in her autobiog-
raphy (1969). In None Turn Back, Hervey Russells life parallels that of
Jamesons own.
Hervey, the heroine of a number of Jamesons novels, and her alter
ego, suffers through pre-and post-operative episodes that fictionalise
Jamesons own ordeal. In fact sentences and paragraphs, word for word
can be traced from her fiction to her autobiography. For example in her
autobiography Jameson writes: Poor Thrawn girl, come back again.
In the dream I wondered what on earth thrawn meant. I half turned
my head. The hill, the night, the voice, lapsed into vapour.60 In None
Turn Back it became: Poor thrawn girl, come back again. In her dream
she wondered what on earth the word thrawn meant. She half turned
towards him.61 Moreover, in her autobiography she wrote: I was furi-
ous with my body: it had been as soundly and strongly built as a ship or
a tree, and ought not have succumbed to my neglect. I could not forgive
it.62 The fictional working of this was: She felt very angry that her
body, as strong and soundly built as a tree, should have been spoiled by
her long neglect and hard youth. It had rallied so many times to her will
that she could not forgive it for failing her.63 Illustrations like this are
countless in her writing. When Jameson had exhausted the usefulness
of her notebooks, full of events in her life, she announced that she
intended to have control and to maintain this control over them: Over
Women Writers 97
this history and the first sections concern romance in life as it was
her overriding concern: the dominant interest, in fact the funda-
mental impulse behind every action, has been the desire for
romance.75 Chapter titles reflect various stages in her life: Out of the
Past, Looking back upon the naughty nineties, and The writing of
Three Weeks. But at chapter 11, similar to Humphreys, there was a
change; the autobiographical writing ceased and a discursive treatise
entitled: An Earnest Discussion of the Theory of Re-incarnation fol-
lows. This change in orientation is accompanied by explicit political
comment.
Glyn made pronouncements about the war on everything from
French etiquette, French soldiers, inefficient womens fund-raising, and
stress of war on manners. Another chapter has remarkable discussions
that cover the morals of society, divorce, sex, social opinions and much
more. Her anger was razor sharp and contemptuous when faced with
what she took to be the idle attitude of the French: One should never
judge a nation by the scum which appears upon the top.76 It hardly
appears to be the same writer, the blunt and acerbic pitch is disquieting,
even shocking, compared to the tone of her novels. Open any page at
random in Three Weeks and one is assailed by sentimental and romantic
narrative: and she smiled a strange, sweet smile, do you know, I find
you like a rare violin which hitherto has been used by ordinary musi-
cians .77 Yet in her autobiography there is an intransigence that belies
her hitherto sentimental romanticism. This expositional writing is sim-
ilar to that of Humphreys in that many paragraphs open with a ques-
tion, followed by the answer: What has become of the proud old French
race? The French of today are an astonishing people. Ungrateful, emo-
tional, dramatic, crafty and self-seeking; polite only for appearances
sake.78 The abrupt change from autobiography to political and social
commentator changed swiftly back to conventional autobiography. It
appears that once they have, in their opinion, established themselves as
serious writers, they can move on without rancour to the next stage of
their autobiography.
This lack of rancour might be explained by Nietzsches notion of
ressentiment.79 Both Glyn and Humphreys were steeped in romanticism.
They deployed disappointments and various hurts in their lives as mate-
rial for their novels, thus experiencing the comfort of a natural cathar-
sis. They were forward-looking, well-travelled and prepared to develop
their next novels. To have rancour, they would need to hold on to past
injustices, remember and recast negative events. But their reworking, in
the form of novels, made negative aspects positive. According to
100 Gender, Professions and Discourse
At the time she was terribly mortified and astonished but not
sufficiently so to prevent her writing and publishing her first novel,
Women Writers 101
The Pot Boils. Jameson entered the genre of social and political novels,
which dealt in particular with the encroaching brutalities of fascism,
the General Strike, war and the problems of mens and womens rela-
tionships. She also published many articles and in time became the
first woman president of the International Association of Poets,
Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists (PEN), succeeding from
such distinguished writers as John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells and
J.B. Priestley.
Her public success and literary acclaim came from her serious, high-
brow novels and recognition of her intellectual competency. So for
Jameson there was no need to use her autobiography to disclose and
display her ability to have opinions on public issues; her novels and
articles were witness to this. Instead, Jameson wrote from the: wish to
discover before it is too late what sort of person I have been, without
allowing vanity and cleverness to soften the outline of the creature.85
Although she had drawn hugely on her own life experiences for her
novels, her wish was to write with sincerity. Throughout her autobiog-
raphy she displayed a self-consciousness of the effort this required. The
reader is told how she began each day of writing by: tearing up part,
much or little, of the previous days work and rewriting it in the inter-
ests of dryness and accuracy.86 Unlike Orczy and Syrett, Jameson did
not shy away from painful episodes. For example, she described what
she considered to be her only passionate affair in her life: What fol-
lows has been torn up and rewritten five times; I must finish with it,
lying as little as possible.87 this intrusion into her own narrative dis-
course highlights her concern that readers may forget that this autobi-
ography was not fiction. Similar reminders are provided throughout
the text by the insertion of date references as a self-conscious reminder
to its factual content: I am writing this on the 17 of November,
1961.88
Jamesons autobiography is candid and unembellished. It is undoubt-
edly about her and not a platform for political or biographical com-
ments. The exacting effort she took makes her style refreshingly
straightforward. To cite an instance, in her upfront manner, Jameson
would write a private thought, quite likely held by many, that would
pass unvoiced. For instance, during her pregnancy she remembered: I
loathed the deformation and heaviness of my body, and envied every
thin young girl I saw, the poorest and the plainest.89 In another raw
incident before her divorce from her first husband she clearly recalled:
One icy night in the winter of 1916 I exasperated him into throwing
102 Gender, Professions and Discourse
The chapters that follow, unlike the earlier five chapters, are organised
by theme. The first in this section of the book discusses the hitherto
ignored aspect of the frontispiece photograph, and is closely linked
with the chapter that follows, Prefaces, Prologues, Forewords and
Introductions. The study of frontispiece photographs has significant
importance in the formation of womens personal identity and
consciousness. Linda Haverty Rugg wrote that: This [the photograph]
is a subject deserving serious attention, for it is precisely uninterro-
gated presentations of photography and autobiography that can work
toward the most powerful support of ideological assumptions. But, I
decided instead to concentrate on [ ... ] the self in language and
image.1
Photography, placed in conjunction with autobiographical texts,
helps us to unpack these identities and the notion of self. In my opin-
ion, the function of the Frontispiece Image raises many questions. What
are we to assume from the first images that the writer wants us, the
reader, to take with us through the book from the beginning? How does
the introduction of photographs into autobiographical texts help or
complicate the autobiographical form? Why did the autobiographers
select that particular image as a portrayal of the self? Do women from
different professions or classes tend to select similar or different images
of themselves? These questions need a full discussion because, as a part
of the autobiographical narrative, these images are allied to notions of
personal identity and consciousness contained in the body of the text.
Therefore we need to look at what makes this meaningful, and see how
conscious and unconscious processes and social mores take on meaning
and exercise an effect.
107
108 Gender, Professions and Discourse
For Barthes the second level and more consequential aspect of the
photograph is its punctum, the element that:
shoots out like an arrow, and pierces me [ ... ] this prick, this mark
made by a pointed instrument [ ... ] refers to the notion of punctuation,
and [the photographs] are in effect punctuated, sometimes even
speckled with these sensitive points; [ ... ] This second element which
will disturb the studium [ ... ] also: sting, speck, cut, [ ... ] A photo-
graphs punctum is that accident which pricks me [ ... ] is poignant
to me.16
imbued her parents fantasies about their offspring, but it also bears
the hallmarks of the dominant conventions used in professional stu-
dios to distract the viewer. Portrait conventions popular with earlier
Victorians are mimicked; the photographs deliberately conceal the
real child. Rather than the anchorage closing down a search for visual
clues, this image acts as a cloaking mechanism. This stimulates the
need for examination because there is a great deal of social fantasy
going on.
West contested the representation foisted upon her. She made it plain
that there was a difference between what she had to wear and what she
herself would have chosen. In the opening pages of her book she
described the photograph and commented:
First her fine hair is fig fluffed out around her neck, her straight
fringe combed over her forehead. Then her pinafore is taken off to
reveal a white nuns veiling dress. For where her elders see a delicate
little girl with skim-milk skin and speedwell eyes, she knows herself
to be a rumbustious tomboy keen to exercise untrammelled limbs,
and impatient.20
We are not told what was twisted and far from usual, but it appears
obvious that her parents wanted to re-write the family life through
photographic fictions. But these are not included in her autobiography;
there are no other photographs in her book. She wrote: My behaviour
sadly disappointed both my parents. It became for myself one of those
114 Gender, Professions and Discourse
shameful memories and I have all too many of them which seize
you by the scruff of the neck as you lie awake at night, and shake you
pitilessly.22 West recognised the lies that were formulated by this visual
memory, and yet she invites the reader to view her as this romantic
nave apparition. In fact this iconoclasm appears to be important to
her throughout her autobiography. She was keen to strip away the care-
fully constructed representation that her parents wanted to remain for
posterity. We cannot know Wests motives, but such contradictory
textsu (visual and narrative), in her book are puzzling. From her auto-
biography I would conjecture that West is demonstrating that a life
cannot be reconstructed by the will of others in visual images alone,
and that the ultimate control of how her life was to be depicted lay
with her written word.
It is clear that this photographic image is a fabrication. It was the
image that the parents wanted to be projected of their angel for all
time. The photograph actively promotes nostalgia and incites reverie.
As Susan Sontag noted: all such talismanic uses of photographs express
a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempts
to contact or lay claim to another reality.23 Whilst the relationship
with her parents may have been complicated, West took control of
this parental, photographic authorship and interpretation in her deci-
sion to use this image. West used her frontispiece photographic image
against the grain. Instead of it being for the reader the likeness of the
child she once was, the reader is informed that it was in fact a false
representation. The distorted and falsifying aspect in this photo-
graphic arrangement sets up a fiction or puzzle that needed to be
decoded.
The question and establishment of the notion of masking in photo-
graphs of autobiographers as young children, raises a similar question
as to whether the masking trait is apparent in frontispiece photographs
that depict the autobiographers as adult. This scrutiny is divided into
two parts, each of which focuses upon a different facet of these por-
traits. The first examines the use of a snapshot from a private album
and the second, and by far most popular with these autobiographers,
examines the studio photograph.
Actress and writer Nancy Price (Figure 7.2) is of particular interest
because she employed both amateur snapshot and studio portraiture in
pivotal roles.24 She used a non-studio photograph for the frontispiece
and one taken in a studio for the back dust-jacket. Price was a distin-
guished actress and part of Sir Frank Bensons Company; a benefactress
The Frontispiece Image in Autobiography 115
to the theatre when she sold her yacht and all her possessions to help its
survival; and a patriot, when she spent a gruelling ten months at sea in
the First World War . These alone attest to her role as a commanding
and committed public woman. But throughout her autobiography she
referred to herself as a countrywoman: I find myself ever more at ease
with country-folk than city-dwellers, with the vagabond rather than
the sophisticated.25 Her text is peppered with anecdotal tales of coun-
try people and her many pets and animals. There is a generous selection
of photographs throughout, the majority of which are of animals, with
their owners, in country settings.
Equally, we are told of her career, political and social milieu. She
was held in affection and esteem by Princess Louise, Queen Mary,
Ladies Oxford and Asquith and the Duchess of Hamilton, to name
but a few. Of the literary greats almost too numerous to list, she
recalled: That men have both accepted my companionship and also
given me theirs has been a source of rich experience to me. 26 These
companions included Yeats, G.K. Chesterton, Kipling, de la Mare,
Sitwell and Sackville -West. She was herself the writer of more than a
dozen novels. At the political front she was the acquaintance of and
dined with, Chamberlain, Lloyd George, Baldwin, Macdonald, Attlee,
and Winston Churchill. She had lived in Hampstead, Russell Square,
Bloomsbury and Kensington, and at the time of writing, owned a cot-
tage in Sussex and a flat in London. Her autobiography shows the two
very distinct spheres of her life; the private countrywoman and the
very public actress, who was author and friend to the rich and
famous.
The point here is that Nancy Price was much more than the country-
woman image that she chose to exhibit on both the dust-jacket and in
her frontispiece photograph. The frontispiece photograph appears to
have been selected from her album and bears the legend, Boneys
Service Love Nancy. Boney, a parrot is perched with flapping wings
upon a tennis racket held by Nancy. She is in profile, laughing, eyes
twinkling with obvious enjoyment and totally absorbed in the game
between the two of them. The parrots wings, either flexed ready for
flight, or pointing skywards as he settles down, suggest lightness and
exhilaration, a stretch for freedom. The energy and movement evoked
by the parrots wings truly capture the slice of a moment-in-time.
Barthes has argued: that this insertion of the natural and universal
in the photograph is particularly forceful because of the photographs
privileged status as a guaranteed witness of the actuality of the events it
represents.27
The Frontispiece Image in Autobiography 117
The naturalness of the mise en scne ascribes more truth to the image.
Prices status here is predicated on the realism of the codes which
articulate the essence of her subject, and it is this latent power that
ascribes meaning to the reader. With this visual text there is a full con-
sonance between image and written text. The area of difficulty lies in
its relationship between the text and the image (Figure 7.3) on the dust
jacket. The back cover photograph on Prices book is obviously a studio-
posed image required by the publishers. Price, seated with her three
dogs, appears perfectly groomed.
She gazes directly at the camera lens with a merest hint of a smile. Her
simple dark jacket, skirt and checked cravat are subdued and suggest coun-
try comfort rather than a fashionable town suit. The deliberate position-
ing of the dogs, although asymmetrical, does create balance to the image.
But coupled with the lack of narrative background and the stiffness in this
photograph, the deliberately arranged poses appear contrived.
We know that the function of this dust-jacket studio picture is to be a
visual message, aimed to sum up a character, along with the blurb, to
give a pre-taster to the prospective reader of how to appreciate and
understand this writer. But I do not believe that these stylised images,
do in fact lead to a true representation of the writer. They are cold and
sterile and produce what Barthes described as an average affect. What
the reader sees is a codified version constructed by a professional eye. It
is brash, clear and uncompromisingly bland. It tells the reader little
and, with a cursory glance, does not invite speculation. This studio
photograph is squarely set in the sphere of advertising. The hollow
effigy is a glamorised, theatrical representation of a marketing ideal of
a countrywoman. Some frontispiece photographs deceive in a more
subtle manner. However the question remains; are all studio photo-
graphs so obvious in their portrayal of myths? Do such photographs
automatically foreclose speculation? And do some signifiers escape and
cause a punctum and conjecture? It is possible to argue that this studio
photograph attempts to co-operate Price into a discourse about repro-
duction and family life. The puppy is the same breed as the parent
dogs. Thus this image allays any anxieties the reader may have about
the sexual orientation of the writer.
But how do studio photographs operate for women in public offi-
cial roles? For this, photographs of headmistresses, Frances R. Gray,
first High School Mistress of St. Pauls Girls School (Figure 7.4) and
Lilian M. Faithfull, formerly Principal of the Ladies College
Cheltenham (Figure 7.5) will be used. 28 Both women had had highly
successful careers as headmistresses. Gray was also a J.P. and awarded
118 Gender, Professions and Discourse
and bleak. She has reached a turning point. The photographic back-
ground shows her without clues to her past or her expectations for
the future. The desire to present a secure contemplative woman has
an unconscious hidden agenda, that of a dissolved past without a
concrete future. Here there is evasion and obfuscation. In the linking
of the photograph to the text latent codes fuse which essentially
unmask and become authoritative.
It therefore appears that studio portraits, more than personal snaps,
can complicate the efforts of the viewer to read the image. These pro-
fessional frames aim to represent the manner in which their subjects
would appear to view life. But there is a further level of complexity
when the frontispiece photograph is one of a painted portrait. Richard
Brilliant wrote that portrait artists avoided strong expressions of feeling
because traditionally they are thought to reflect transitory states of
being and are therefore an obstacle [ ... ] to capture[ing] the essential
self, existing beneath the flux of emotions.36
Writer Elinor Glyn (Figure 7.6) used for her Frontispiece Image a por-
trait by Philip de Laszlo. Glyns full-face likeness projects a level gaze,
but is winsome and fey. The frame is designed to focus the viewer on
this face. Of course, this is a photographic reproduction of a painting,
probably a charcoal drawing. But we do not need to apply different
analytical methods to it because the use of this particular image is an
act of choice, similar to the selection of a photograph.
There are no narrative background distractions and only a large-
pearled necklace and earrings to offer social status. The one bared
shoulder is seductive, and entices the viewers eyes to the pale slim neck
and red lips. The long fiery-red hair has a reasonable amount of styling,
but is not too organised with its suggestion of soft femininity. The silk-
organza shawl is seductively draped over her hair. Both ends seem to
emanate from the same side, baring the shoulder evocative of discarded
propriety. The muted iridescence of the gowns colour created Glyn as
an ephemeral winged creature. She appears as a fantasy apparition;
romantic and inaccessible. This is an image which would be in keeping
with the expectations of readers of low-brow romantic novels. But, as
her autobiography attests, Glyn was a prolific, hardworking writer.
Aristocratic by birth, she became the family breadwinner and churned
out some 80 volumes to pay her debts. For Glyn to select this representa-
tion of herself for her frontispiece conceals much of her character. It is
candid in its aim of signifying a public image of a writer of romance and
candid in recognising what Glyn considered herself to be; a true roman-
tic. In this it is shrewd marketing. But Glyns autobiography does not
The Frontispiece Image in Autobiography 125
portraits of the first half of the nineteenth century. This lack can be
seen as an attempt to prevent loose signifiers, and would suggest that
the meaning of the photograph can be arrived at without this visual
aid. There is a preconceived agenda, no spontaneity and no intended
element of chance. When a background is introduced, as in the photo-
graph of a young girl, there is an element which makes the deliberately
arranged pose in the studio appear disruptively contrived and invite
examination. If a background is present in the adult poses, it is indis-
tinct as can be observed in Grays portrait.
These absences focus attention onto the sitter. These portraits con-
formed to the formality of a portrait-making situation and appear also
to conform to the expected demeanour of the genre. There is gloss, for-
mal stillness and a heightened sense of composure. What I find impor-
tant in the art of concealment is a distanced, unaffected expression,
and a lack of emotion. In the main, the sitters pose exhibits a three-
quarters image, their gaze is not at the viewer so eye contact is avoided,
which draws a veil across the soul. As Sontag noted: In the normal
rhetoric of the photographic portrait, facing the camera signifies solem-
nity, frankness, the disclosure of the subjects essence. [ ... ] For politi-
cians the three-quarter gaze is more common: a gaze that soars rather
than confronts.40
This is the look of most of these professional women. The exception
to this occurs in those portraits of actresses. We see this in both Price
and Vanburgh and interestingly in Glyns painted portrait. For the
actresses I would suggest that this is due to their being used to all man-
ner of poses. But for others, such as Glyn, Sontags observation that,
facing the camera signifies solemnity, frankness, the disclosure of the
subjects essence has more validity.41 In the chapter, Women Writers I
showed how low-brow writers like Glyn were often at pains to exhibit a
seriousness not shown in their work.
The clothes remain an explicit part of the narrative because as I
observed, the dress of headmistresses Gray and Faithfull presented a
dignified appearance which was essential to their participation in the
public domain. Of course, an analysis of the costume narrative has
been an important part of film analysis.42 But it is important to extend
such analyses to the photograph. As John Tagg rightly noted: Power
then, is what is centrally at issue here: the forms and relations of power
which are bought to bear on practices of representation or constitute
their conditions of existence.43 This dignified yet feminine approach is
also exhibited in the photographs of women doctors. These professional
128 Gender, Professions and Discourse
130
Prefaces, Prologues, Forewords and Introductions 131
These women were not only among the forerunners in their chosen
professions, they were among the forerunners of professional women
who chose to write about their experiences. There were few antecedents
for them to follow. The readily available models would be from male
autobiographies. Because of this I briefly examined examples of male
texts, as similar prefatory texts may have had some influence on the form
and content for these women. Fifteen male autobiographies were
selected from professions comparable to those of the women autobi-
ographers. What is very noticeable is that all of these male autobiogra-
phers, in some form or other, display self-confidence.
For example, if friends and colleagues are mentioned it is in the
manner of a formal acknowledgement. Painter John Lavey extended:
grateful thanks to Katharine Fitzgerald and John Stewart Collis for
helping me to put my stray memories together.2 Headmaster Guy
Kendall wrote both a preface and an introduction. In the preface he
recorded that he was encouraged to write by the success of his two books
on education. But in the introduction that followed, he noted the dis-
couragement of friends who stated that: I dont think you will find a
large public for a book of that kind.3 Yet he had the confidence to go
ahead. If there are any self-deprecatory remarks, they are tinged with
humour and would cause the reader to query any implied humility.
Adrian Brunel, a film editor, noted his: unspectacular part in a spec-
tacular background [ ... ] and I apologise if I appear to have recap-
tured that feeling of importance.4 Such confidence in the legitimacy
of writing about their lives is epitomised in the forthright address by
schoolmaster Frank Fletcher. He encapsulates the style of many male
autobiographers:
Finally, in a similar vein, Lord Riddell was even more succinct and
incisive:
This begins in October 1908 and ends in July 1914, thus covering,
more or less, the six years before the war [ ... ] Some of the entries may
perhaps be regarded as of historical importance. As before I have
132 Gender, Professions and Discourse
White recounted that she was: very much astonished, for it never
occurred to me that anyone would care to read anything I had to say
about myself.16 In a similar manner Canziani was pressed by friends:
to write some of my reminiscences.17 Over three-quarters of Canzinis
preface is allotted to a declaration of the part each friend played in
encouraging her. Support from renowned patriarchal figures and friends
provided the cachet of approval and highlighted their insecurity about
their writing. However, this lack of self-belief is further disclosed, in the
marginalia, by the presence of self-deprecatory remarks which allude to
the worthiness of the project.
The novelists, as professional writers, were aware of the difficulty
and complexity of the autobiographical genre. Nancy Price wrote: it is
just a glancing back [ ... ] what mattered to me and this in a very inad-
equate way I have tried to set this down.18 Similarly, Netta Syrett
believed her life: too ordinary to be worth recording.19 But the self-
apologetic prose of the nurses and VADs is very different. Had their
careers not led them to take part in war work, their experiences would
not have been incredible enough to inspire any interest to record it.
The awareness of this did cause anxiety, insomuch as 25 per cent of
this profession and a similar percentage of writers recorded their con-
cerns. VAD and journalist May Sinclair noted: This is a journal of
impressions and nothing more.20 Nurse M.A. St Clair Stobart is more
explicit about the worth of her writing:
Edwardian women. I now want to look at the use of metaphor, and its
effect, in the marginalia. This device was not used by any of the artists;
but it was taken up by almost 20 per cent of doctors, practically 25 per
cent of the headmistresses, nearly 50 per cent of nurses and 80 per cent
of the writers who were part of this survey. My research uncovered that
two main strands of feminine metaphoric imagery were used. For doc-
tors and nurses images that smouldered, seethed, fermented and blazed
with desire were employed. Whereas professional writers put to use
metaphors from a similar semantic field of tangled wools, threads, and
roots. The doctors and nurses appear to have recourse to romantic nov-
els and those of the writers employ imagery from a domestic and pri-
vate sphere.
Dr Elizabeth Bryson began her introduction with a meditation on the
complexity of memory. She questions in a self-reflective manner: We
cannot understand memory. It seems certain that everything we expe-
rience, see, hear, or feel, leaves an impression perfect, indelible and
inevitable in the mysterious region of memory.24
However a complete change in style and tone follows. The passage
reiterates the tenets of the earlier paragraphs, but a writerly expression
and tone take over. The memory became:
within her; the beauty of that storied scene and that flaming sky
stirred her soul to a burning indignation [ ... ] Turning westward she
saw between her and the crimson of the clouds, a vast black bulk,
Milbank Prison, like some monstrous beast from the river of slime.
Women may be and are, she remembered, prisoners. [ ... ] Fifty years
after, a grey-haired woman [ ... ] remembered her girlhood and its
passionate despair.29
The flaming sky suggests a Turner painting whilst monstrous beast [ ... ]
river of slime reminds the reader of Dickens Bleak House. The alliterative
use of soft feminine/sexual sounds as in, seethed, storied and stirred her
soul exhibit her intensified emotional temperature. There is strong sex-
ual tension and a suggestion of impropriety. However, when Burstall
wrote about social/political issues and on womens struggles they elic-
ited the strong plosive, masculine sounds of black, bulk, and beast. But
it is important to note that all of this excitable writing is conveyed in the
third person. At one and the same time the reader is drawn into Burstalls
ardent fervour, but also is distanced by the defamiliarising aspect of
third person delivery. Here the particular interest in these extracts rests
on two main points; the conspicuous effect of these metaphors, along
with the intensity of the language which resides in the margins of their
work. Both Burstall and Bryson use a colour code in the symbolism of
this emotional observation, which in these very visual renderings,
appear to draw on images from Victorian narrative paintings.30 But
rather than disguising or softening the underlying social/political mes-
sage, the idiosyncratic semantic field draws attention to the ideas which
are not totally subsumed by their novelistic tone.
For headmistresses and doctors, schooled in professional methods, to
write of emotional subjects would have been anathema. Their efforts
to secure an exemplary feminine discourse in the main body of the
text are compromised as their emotional temperature has broken
through. So in a last ditch attempt to express sentiments through met-
aphors, they lacked the nous and nuance to produce a ratified account
which would escape particular notice. Instead it appears that in the
move away from their constraints of official writing, they were unable
to rein in their delivery. From this breech in normative discourse, the
reader witnesses an atypical bodice-ripping display of pent-up agita-
tion as the writers shrug off their professional attire and release
subjugated emotions.
Bryson, Furze and Burstall all show, in varying degrees, strong sexual
tensions and hints of impropriety. Also, in Bryson and Furze we read
Prefaces, Prologues, Forewords and Introductions 137
I have kept locked diaries for years, in which I have tried to set down
the unvarnished truth [ ... ] but I cannot publish these now, since
many of the people referred to in them are still living. [ ... ] [I will] set
out truthfully [her italics] [ ... ] as can be published at the present
time.36
Whilst Glyn was unequivocally keen to protect her friends from expo-
sure, Jameson exposed the problems that ensue with gaps and ellipses:
I feel an ineffaceable repugnance to writing about close friends [ ... ]
This falsifies the record at once. But what else can I do? Nothing.37 Her
resigned tone illuminates her frustration in this. Actor and writer
Nancy Price used active, demonstrative verbs: I will set down as truth-
fully as I can the images I see. These images I have endeavoured to
present as they appear to me.38 In a similar manner, nurse and writer
Amy Borden noted: I have not invented anything [ ... ] they [memories]
recount true episodes that I cannot forget [ ... ] Any attempt to reduce
them to order would require artifice on my part and would falsify
them.39
Although Furze recognised that in order to be accurate they may face
problems of objectivity, she shared the sentiment that honest expres-
sion was more important:
above, friends were not exposed to this explicitness. In this she faced
and understood the duality of perception: I am trying to do some-
thing entirely different. Trying, in short, to eat away a double illusion:
the face I show to other people, and the illusion I have of myself by
which I live. [sic]42 This double illusion is also raised by dancer
Isadora Duncan: How can we write the truth about ourselves? Do we
even know it? There is the vision our friends have of us; the vision we
have of ourselves; and the vision our lover has of us. Also the vision
of our enemies. [sic] And all these visions are different.43 In these
quotations we see the problem, similar to that mentioned in the above
chapter on Images, ( raised by Barthes in Camera Lucida and again
examined in The Lovers Discourse) that of multiple layers of
perception.44
The act of writing a prefatory chapter, rather than providing clarity,
adds a further layer of perception. Derrida found it necessary to view
prefaces in the terms of supplementary and supplement.45 The term sup-
plement implies a thing or part added to remedy deficiencies, to pro-
vide further information to something already complete.46 Therefore, if
we consider the etymology of the various prefatory terms, it is clear
that, as Derrida noted: the preface harbours a lie.47 In Derridian terms,
if a text is self-sufficient, there is no need for it to be added to. The sup-
plement/prefatory chapter is an exterior addition and surplus. As I have
already suggested, these additions similar to those of the frontispiece
photograph, can act as a cloaking mechanism in their strange and
deceptive status.48 Indeed we may do well to heed Hegels comment
which advised his readers: Dont take me seriously in a preface [ ... ] and
if I speak to you outside of what I have written, these marginal com-
ments cannot have the value of the work itself.49
I began this chapter with a series of questions about the function of
the prefatory chapters in these autobiographies. To perform in an intro-
ductory capacity, and to elucidate in preparation for what was to follow,
does not appear to be crucial. There is a division between those like
Faithfull and Scharlieb who took on the template provided by male
autobiographers in similar professions, and between those who pre-
sented and almost floundered under considerations for contemporary,
cultural mores. This division indicates a sense of confidence and accom-
plishment on the one hand, but on the other hand the category has
those who appear uncertain of the image they wished to present. Their
narrative presents the problems that they had in trying to make a fit
with the earlier genre definitions. Should they present themselves as
Prefaces, Prologues, Forewords and Introductions 141
are always available from other discourses and may have given these
writers a space to express what may have been unsayable. This issue of
silence will be investigated in the next chapter. For now, it is sufficient
to recognise the role of the metaphor in these marginal chapters. These
professional women had written intelligent, logical narratives with
appropriate decorum. Then, having done justice to their careers and
provided a text as a role-model, they release a fragrant nose-gay of the
feminine woman that was subsumed under a professional cloak. Much
in the manner of the punctum witnessed in the frontispiece image,
which these texts are set alongside, these prefatory chapters subvert and
punctuate.
9
Silences
This chapter works on the premise that what is not here in the text is
often as meaningful as what is. I want to produce a method of interpret-
ing these absences or silences. Silences have an identity and we need to
establish what it is. Susan Sontag noted: A genuine emptiness, a pure
silence are not feasible either conceptually or in fact.1 This discussion
will attempt to construct an explanatory model to address the problem-
atic area of silences, and to produce a method whereby silence, in its
many forms, can be constructively analysed and shown to be as inform-
ative as the written word. Textual silences are the aspects that can be
revealed through the appraisal of various stylistic configurations and
devices, such as punctuation, ellipses, pace, tone, and spatial use of the
page. Since silence is such an umbrella term and comes with a raft of
connotations, I have chosen to describe all these configurations of
silences under the term of textual gap. This I believe, will provide for a
freer examination and give cohesion to the various forms into which
this rhetorical device can morph.
There are few theoretical works on autobiographies which address the
subject of silence. For example, William Dilthey, James Olney, Simon
Denlith, Regina Gagnier, Mary Jean Corbett, Liz Stanley, Laura Marcus,
Julia Swindells, Mary Evans, and others, have not considered silence as
part of their remit.2 Silence, when it is addressed by Virginia Woolf and
later by Dale Spender, is read by them in the light of the gendered sen-
tence and gendered language, and is almost exclusively stylistic.3
Woolfs points were echoed by Hlne Cixous and the criture feminine
school who aimed to celebrate womens writing and thus remove the
repression that could produce silence. In 1995 Maroula Joannou posi-
tioned the feminine as identified in silence, absence, and incoherence.
She identified the reason for this as the dominance of patriarchal
143
144 Gender, Professions and Discourse
discourse. But for Tillie Olsen, Joanna Russ and Philippe Lejeune, it is
the silence of the unwritten; the reasons why, in the past, women and
(Lejeune included men) have failed to commit to paper, be it fiction or
otherwise.
In Olsens ground-breaking book Silences, her concern was with the
reason why women have produced little written work. She was not con-
cerned with what she called natural silences, but the unwritten the
hidden silence of work aborted, deferred or denied, which did not
come to fruition.4 She accounts for this silence by censorship in one
form or another. Censorship by the self, political or cultural, self-doubt,
fear of reception, are all suggested by her as reasons for not writing.
Whilst it could be argued that the textual gaps that are of interest in the
current chapter are a form of Olsens censorship model, I would sug-
gest that the textual gaps of interest here were attempts to break through
or subvert repression. It seems to me that, if we deploy Olsens para-
digm, the achievement of these professional women in writing their
autobiographies is all the more impressive. Olsens model, of course,
deals with the constraints which pre-date the act of writing, or inhibit
it altogether. What I want to address here is the silence which occurs
during the act of writing itself.
Literary theorists, however, do address the problem of silence in
fictional writing. Roland Barthes, Pierre Macherey, Patricia Laurence,
Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, recognise and engage with gaps and
omissions in fictive situations.5 For example, Iser and Laurence cite spe-
cific novels and each concentrate on a particular area. In their separate
works, both examine negation and absence as a starting point, which
can then be linked to the social context of oppression and exclusion
from public spheres. Laurence brings to the fore the position of women
as silent and observing rather than as speaking subjects of their own
lives.6 In this work on silences Macherey, as a Marxist philosopher, does
imply that texts should be investigated to find the hidden ideological
views of the writer. I intend to ignore this aspect of political affiliation,
as this is not part of my remit. Instead his theory on the unsaid and
the unsayable may be used in creative ways, to engage with his rhe-
torical question: Can we make silence speak?7 But it needs to be remem-
bered that these theorists are working from an exclusively literary
perspective.
However, the work of theorists John Cage, Michel Foucault and Susan
Sontag can be helpful in this. John Cage, writing in his seminal work,
Silences in music, insisted: There is no such thing as silence. Something
is always happening that makes a sound.8 Sontags essay The Aesthetics
Silences 145
of Silence is directed at the artist who works in the audible, visual and
performative fields.9 What is useful for this study is the way she insists
that silence does not exist in the literal sense, and her idea of silence as
termination and as continuity is thought provoking. Of particular inter-
est is her notion that silence implies its opposite and that it has an
identity: Silence never ceases to imply its opposite and to depend on
its presence; just as there cant be up without down [ ... ] so one must
acknowledge a surrounding environment of sound or language in order
to recognise silence [ ... ] any given silence has its identity.10 Sontag is
useful as a spring-board for this study of textual gaps as her ideas may
be critically and creatively used as part of my overall work in this area,
to enable a model of reading silence in its many forms.
To read a text for what is not there is difficult as the exploration of
silence uncovers a number of problems in the limits of language. As I
showed in earlier chapters, narrative can both reveal and conceal. The
question therefore arises; can the same be said of silence? The reader
must be able to understand the implications of the moments of silence
to establish the relevancies to the adjacent events and the context in
which it is found, as this will reveal much about the meaning of that
particular silence. Furthermore we need to examine if there is a clear
division between experiences that can be articulated and those which
are inexpressible.
Since there are many forms of textual gaps, it is necessary to establish
the distinctions and, where appropriate, the reasons for these omissions
and examine the stylistic devices utilised. To help formulate this
approach these textual gaps will be analysed under the following head-
ings: first, silence as a deliberate play for reasons of tact and protection
of the living, second, silence as reticence and fear of reception, and
third silence due to tragedy. Before this, in order to provide the rigour
for a useful methodology to examine silence, it is necessary to start
with an appraisal of the fundamental authorial capital of the autobiog-
rapher. There is, it must be said, a degree of ambiguity in silence as a
communicative tool, and an effort must be made to minimise this and
prevent claims of textual gaps which in truth, do not exist. For exam-
ple, Laura Knight, the painter, was keen not to have any material ties.
When she married in 1903 she recorded: Harold and I did not intend to
set up house. Neither of us wished to do so, nor could we afford it.
Everyone knowing this gave us trunks, hatboxes, writing-cases and
collar-boxes as wedding presents.11
In point of fact, they spent their time travelling from Nottingham to
Cornwall, to Holland, to London and many more locations. They lived
146 Gender, Professions and Discourse
nothing unusual with that; but there follows a few pages on: L. played
centre forward and Margaret Thornton, who had been at Roedean was
an outstanding back.15 This anomalous treatment of fully naming one
friend and of cloaking the other friend in mystery stands out starkly.
The reader is jolted by its oddness. The narrative itself moves swiftly
along, in an attempt to normalise the memory, and to prevent the
reader from having a moment to contemplate the nature of this
relationship.
Barlow could have omitted her friends full name at the friends
request, or it could be an attempt to diminish the importance of the
relationship and elicit closure. As a means for both of these, it fails dis-
mally. If we look at her treatment of other friendships and relationships,
a pattern emerges. Barlow recorded her early romances with her broth-
ers cricketing friends and with grammar schoolboys, and used their
full names. Men friends in her early twenties were named except for
three. These three had made romantic advances and were rejected: T.F.,
H.H., and W.J.16 It appears that throughout her autobiography there are
dual standards. Acquaintances were noted in full, whereas close or
intimate relationships were coded in initials.
The rejected young men may have gone on to marry and would not
want their advances made public, and her close female companion
would most probably have had professional status and a need for
anonymity. Equally in these instances Barlow may well have feared
disapprobation, loss of reputation and loss of social respectability for
these intimate friends. Silence here is due to the social values which
foment the need for censorship as a means of self-protection. The gap
between public opinion and private opinion appears to be too great,
and leads to silence. However, rather than rendering invisible, the use
of initials has in fact drawn attention to the friendships, and leaves a
space for alternative readings. The question arises as to why an autobi-
ographer would leave a topic unresolved and susceptible to interpreta-
tion by the reader.
Marriage, divorce and the deaths of parents are all central moments
in anyones life. It is thus of some consequence that the record of these
received summary attention in these narratives. Headmistresses record
little or nothing of their family background. Their parents, if referred
to at all, are shadowy figures, and in fact few begin their autobiogra-
phies with any detail of childhood. None relate the death of either
parent. When we come to look at writers/artists and especially
actresses, the involvements are more pronounced, and as we have
seen, the father is nearly always the major force. An exception to this
148 Gender, Professions and Discourse
it is not the autobiographers words, and can only work if, as readers, we
forget that it was selected by the autobiographer. Their silence over
immodest issues can secure their approbation.
I now want to examine how the layout on the page has significance
in the role of textual gaps. The first part of this examination concen-
trates on the use of elliptical markers and the second part will focus
on the combined effect of these elliptical markers and the language.
First, it must be stated that elliptical marks do not always indicate a
sense of pain or gravity. Cannan, a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD)
in France, sprinkled her narrative with ... as the final notation to a
paragraph. In parts one and two of her autobiography which she called
Growing Up they were less frequent and reinforced a trailing-off of
the paragraph subject, rather than an end. For example: so I think it
must have been a private arrangement of our own ..., or Theyll be a
handy lot ....43 However in Part Three, The War Years, these elliptical
markers increase in frequency and start to appear mid-sentence as
well. At the same time the level of detail increases: He [Major Quiller-
Couch, became her lover] had to ride over to an Aerodrome ... The last
mile through a wood full of honeysuckle, broom and wildflowers and
cornflowers ... The ride home, about ten oclock with the moon still
up, no wind to speak of.44
This usage of ... has a literariness and a fictionality about the style.
There is a dream-like quality and ephemeral beauty that the reader is
encouraged to complete. It maybe possible to say more in another man-
ner but: does it denote a true absence?45 At this stage of her writing, the
elliptical marker simply indicates what might be missing in the text; an
emotional shorthand, or silence as the source of expression.46 The
diegetic excess appears to make the writing poetic. However this usage
changed.
Cannan and Quiller-Couch rendezvous in France. It is at this point
that the minutiae of detail are coupled with an extraordinary excess
of ... and both alternate with an extraordinary economy of implicit
writing. To make this plain it is necessary to use a quotation of some
length:
There, looking down into the waters of the Seine, hurrying by and
having known other wars and other lovers, he asked me to marry
him ... And then went back to Rue Turbigo and in that queer high-
ceilinged room in the Paris-France that had suddenly become home,
sat on his bed and darned some socks and sewed on a button. He
had washed a shirt and hung it to dry on a piece of string stretched
Silences 155
across the room; and we did not know that it was to be our only
housekeeping ... It was our last day so we went out to Meudon and
walked there [ ... ] I walked with him to the Gard du Nord, he carry-
ing his pack. I was wearing his ring and as the train pulled out he
put his dark head down on my hands and kissed them ... The train
pulled out. When I could see and hear again I found the entrance to
the Metro ...47
There were letters. It was very cold [ ... ] A bitter cold. Then the par-
lourmaid brought a telegram. I got up. A voice I didnt know said, I
think this is for me. I took it from the silver tray [ ... .] The Army
Council expressed sympathy.
Actually I had known it for some time, but I still hoped. Now there
was no hope. It was the end of the world.49
156 Gender, Professions and Discourse
Her Major had died. The evident change in her style from long sentences
sprinkled with elliptical markers, which slow the narrative pace and
allow the reader to think, to a tone that is curt with fore-shortened
sentences, firmly encase a silence around his death and her pain. This
different rhythm denotes a more psychological textual gap than
before.
However these elliptical markers are deployed to an even greater effect
in similar psychologically stressful situations. An accomplished com-
poser, Liza Lehmann wrote an account of the death of her son, during
the war, from pneumonia. Hitherto her writing had composure and
freely flowed with a plethora of lightly romantic expressions. For exam-
ple, Meanwhile my two little boys had been born and I was far more
wrapped up in living poems than in any art.50 The chapter, My Sons
entices the reader to anticipate a full account of a painful, but unknown
nature: I now approach a part of my lifes story of which I can scarcely
bear to write. But it must be done for the sake of continuity and com-
pleteness, as well as other reasons which I regard as a duty.51 Her son
Rudolf, 17 and a soldier: was just able to reach home - literally in time
to die.52 It is at this juncture that her narrative style begins to show,
what she herself believed, she had kept under control. She continued:
he was past saving and in one week on March 12th, 1916 he was
gone.53 The strain of writing out such painful memories is palpable and
its force impinges on the reader. There is a tautness apparent which
makes articulation difficult and which allows only the bare-bones to
be given for the sake of other boys and mothers.54 To articulate this
suffering, which at base she does not understand, Lehmann resorts to
rhetorical questions:
Oh! How can I write of it? How can I bear to speak of such anguish as
I have endured? Truly I do so only from a sense of moral obligation. I
wish to blame no one; such feelings of bitterness as I may have felt I
have tried to conquer.55
meaning, and it is at this point that her hard-held fight for narrative
control is overrun and the unchecked emotions burst through. The
frequent use of rhetorical interrogative phrases erupts harshly from
her earlier style, creating a gulf between pre- and post- Rudies death.
The heartbreak in the short imperative and interrogative sentences is
linguistically crushing:
How do you bear it? ... I have not the solace of a strong faith; my
religion had been of the vaguest; [ ... ] But now! if it were humanly
possible to penetrate behind the veil to find a clue to know a
little ever so little more could any effort be too great? I wanted to
find my child! [sic] God help us!56
My son never complained; and when he lay ill at home, his one desire
was still to go back to Woolwich and his work there, for he loved it.
Silences 159
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
After Rudies death, his instructors and the Commandant wrote
that he would have made a splendid soldier. I think, however, that,
failing the spur of war, his natural gifts lay more in the direction of
art or literature An omnivorous reader from childhood (he learnt
to read surprisingly early) he had an innate love of beauty.62
I would suggest that this is a method for handling pain; and that it is a
therapeutic technique for making the whole into containable seg-
ments. It is not an attempt at a modernist structure. Modernist texts, of
course, although they can use ellipsis, work by radically destabilising
the central speaking voice and by working with juxtapositions which
draw from different contexts. The ellipses in these texts do not function
in this way.
Indeed Laurence Sternes writing is emblematic here. This narrative
type has its origins in Tristram Shandy, where structure was also con-
cerned with figurations of silence.63 Sterne used his designs to chart
themes and emotions into his work. In a less graphic form, these autobi-
ographers employ similar tactics. Chapter divisions and divisions within
chapters, syntax, semantics and tense shifts provide the initial markers
which make up the lexicon of silence. The structure on the page mirrors
the emotional turmoil; it is horror that has stimulated stylistics. It
appears that, at the time of writing certain events were inexpressible or
the autobiographers language was inadequate. The compartmentalised
experience with its emotive burden produced a marked consonance
between form and content. In an effort to censor, the autobiographer
allows jumps, jerks, and lumpiness into the narrative. In fact, the more
the autobiographers emotions were aroused, the more the emotional
content became unbounded, and structures of silence were brought in to
shore-up against the impossibility of telling all. It appears that the
greater the emotional content, the less there is written.
There remains one unexamined aspect that I alluded to earlier; why
an autobiographer would leave a topic unresolved and open to conjec-
ture. Why place themselves in a position to be mis-read? Why would
they take that risk, given that with silence, people will always assume,
or think the worst? Yet this aspect of silence a form of risk-taking is
prominent in these texts. It could be that some did not have the imagi-
nation to see any risk to themselves; that they naively believed that the
words on the page were sufficient to contain and provide closure, and
that the reader would accept this and move on unquestioningly. This
notion can only apply when there is conscious control in the writing,
under the assumption that words invite an opinion and that with the
160 Gender, Professions and Discourse
unwritten no inferences can accrue.64 But for some, it could be that the
risk-taking was all important.
These professional women had marked themselves off as different
from other women by the fact that they had entered new territory in
their professions and in the public arena. They had differentiated
themselves, and would be thought of as exceptional. But maybe some
feared that they were not exceptional, and that to leave spaces in their
narrative for the reader to fill would make them more interesting. The
myths created would become the explanatory model of who they were.
Roland Barthes work in Mythologies is pertinent here.65 In this he
showed how certain images or ideas constitute a first layer of meaning
which, in turn, is transformed into myth. The original image of these
women was possibly that of a blue-stocking, dowdy, professional
woman. This is emptied out, and becomes a signifier for a second,
mythical level of meaning. For example, the intimidating, blue-
stocking headmistress can become a woman of mystery and intrigue
when she chooses not to reveal her relationships. The professional
womans original history is crushed by the new myth and her image
becomes instead the form that carries the concept of a risqu and more
interesting woman. If we understand myths as explanatory frameworks
in which cultures can make sense of potentially confusing schema,
then we can argue the notion that these women wanted to break out
from the defined image that society had for them, and then to remould
the myth which was a risky undertaking. The fear expressed in their
prefaces of their worthiness to write an autobiography can be quashed
by engagement in the formation of a new myth. This confirmed them
as exceptional.
Yet these areas of incompleteness invite active intervention. In effect,
the autobiographer has used silence as a way of opening up a distance
between the reader and the author. The space on the page is suggestive
of providing a time for exploring thoughts. So if the reader decides that
an issue is not closed, it is not. It is this silence that gives the text life.
The reader is given power to fill the spaces. Macherey, writing about
fiction, advocates that a book may appear: incomplete; because it has
not said everything, there remains the possibility of saying something
else.66 Of course I am not advocating that every tiny detail of every
thing that can be written in a given situation must be included. But as
Macherey explained: all speech envelops itself in the unspoken , in
other words: in order to say anything, there are other things which
must not be said.67 Robert Lougy proposes that: It is the opposition or
otherness which bestows such structure on the work, and even though
Silences 161
162
Self and Identity 163
the social and cultural identities of the era. It is quite clear that these
are enabling devices for the exploration of female identity and self-
hood in these autobiographies.
Sally Ledger describes the New Woman as having a multiple iden-
tity: a feminist activist, a social reformer, a popular novelist, a
suffragette playwright, a woman poet; she was also often a fictional
construct.21 Yet, in spite of later mentioning that the availability of
higher education for women was blamed by many for their push into
the public sphere. Ledger does not include any of the professions in
her description. If, as Ledger continued: the centrality of marriage,
dissipation in the role of motherhood, and economic imbalance were
seen to be in jeopardy22 by this new circumstance, prominence needs
to be given to what women in the professions understood as their
position. Although not named by Ledger these professional women
were clearly forging new identities for their gender. It would be diffi-
cult to trace, in a manageable way, all the historical nuances and def-
initions of identity, self and subjectivity. The history of subjectivity
has been extensively discussed elsewhere, but I will give a simplified
overview and say something of the current position which informs
my argument. 23 The Oxford English Dictionary records that the self
was recognised as a living formative element, sometime between the
mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, and that the modern
idea of selfhood or integrated rhetoric of self emerges. During that
time there was an increased self-awareness and the sense of self as
connected to natural and moral philosophy, as well as society. It was
Descartes use of I that marked a point in the beginnings of explor-
ing the self, as an individual as opposed to a social act. This writing
hailed a heightened sense of self and some historians suggest that a
preoccupation with the subjective characterises modernity. 24 In the
late seventeenth century John Locke argued in the Essay Concerning
Human Understanding (1690), that the self is a product of experience
and education and consciousness, self-consciousness and human
nature gained common usage, accepting the relationship between
individualised subjectivity and a shared or common nature. 25 This
established the basis for the definition of modern subjectivity. This
rise of the rational self in the early eighteenth century coincided with
a decline in religious belief, and the seeing of man as rational, auton-
omous, and in control of the universe. The new intellectual
Enlightenment myths preferred the elitist model of the self-made
man, whilst the masses, that is, the lower classes, women and
irrational others, continued to practise the relegated religious beliefs.
Self and Identity 167
want to keep women out ... they are jealous of all intellectual work that
women attempt, of all the success they achieve.34
This fervent (albeit marginal) reaction appears to be atypical within
the central forum of professional women. Yet in printing this lengthy
and extreme position the establishment found their opinions justified,
and the myth of the New Woman (as radical, as decadent, as having mas-
culine attributes, as poor mothers, as lesbian), was fuelled. Ethel Raglan,
among others, redresses the casual misogyny present in popular journal-
ism: If the poor girls can do nothing right and exhibit so many faults, it
is curious that they have the brains to occupy important positions in the
work place.35 Her tone became ironic as she rightly identified that heads
of influential businesses employ girl secretaries: Was it because they were
fortunate enough to get the one girl who happened to be the exception
to the rule?36 Rose Macaulays weariness with the biased commentaries
was recorded by a reporter from the Guardian, 13 November 1925.
Macaulay was lecturing on Women as News:
Unfortunately for women at this time, articles and letters directly pro-
moting womens points of view in the public domain were in the minor-
ity. As a rebuttal, these women wrote articles and books which positioned
them in a resistant stance against the dominant patriarchal point of
view. The idea of woman as represented in the dominant codes, and
circumscribed by male views, motivated them to write. They used a
register and tone which had a scholarly objectivity, which was set
against the emotive outbursts of both the male journalism and the
emotional female stance. They have both inserted themselves into, and
taken on, the male, public writing arena and mode of writing, in order
to assert their own sense of identity.
One distinctive view emerged as a rebuff to the use of New Woman
as an identity; that of the term modern girl. This coinage was taken up
by these women autobiographers. It suggests that for them, the term
New Woman may have had pejorative connotations. They did not
170 Gender, Professions and Discourse
decry, deride or find the new woman too extreme. Instead many women
thought her commonplace. Raglan recorded:
accord with the demands of the moment. Moreover, they did recognise
and deal with adversity. Faithfull taking up the masculine metaphors
from the grand narratives observed:
Like men, women wanted new worlds to explore, and the old
well-worn tracks would no longer satisfy them [ ... ] they longed for a
great adventure [ ... ] facing the supreme difficulties and strain of an
Antarctic or Mount Everest expedition [ ... ] so the pioneers of the
womens movement ignored opposition, met difficulties with a
high-hearted courage, lived Spartan lives of incessant work and
self-sacrifice.50
Walking the Hospital skirts were still long [ until a student appeared
in a skirt ] at least six inches off the ground, and attracted a great deal
174 Gender, Professions and Discourse
they want sexual attraction. For the women doctors, it was important
to show their femininity as disproof to assertions by the male medical
fraternity. For actresses it was not only their personal success with
admirers, but it also had importance as a measure of professional
triumph.
Dr Isabel Hutton is one of many doctors who showed a similar preoc-
cupation with hair and dress codes.62 She questions the motives of a
lecturers wife who attended the classes each day, seated in the
front row:
Although Hutton is not expressing her own point of view, she remem-
bered the mentality of a certain class and its disapprobation in a spe-
cific era. She then appears to contradict herself. In the following extract
the reader is left uncertain as to whether Hutton was, or was not, a
dancer:
way of making her move towards that of the New Woman; possibly
the staid and subdued role of a lecturers wife allowed for little
self-expression or passion. She openly desired her feminine self to be
recognised.
In my final extract from Hutton:
much in the minority in her view that fashion was superficial. This
could account for her self-knowledge that she lacked: what is curi-
ously termed presence [sic] [ ... ] and that there was something amiss
with my manner may be deducted from the fact that I was half-way
through my headmistress-ship before strangers ceased to conclude
that I was my secretary.74
In adjuring to dowdiness as an appropriate image, synonymous with
the duty and devotion of a headmistress, Cleeve had failed to have an
assertive, powerful image. Possibly her cloistered life had dimmed her
awareness to visual, non-verbal display and to an understanding of the
male gaze. This was a mistake on her part, because another, less power-
ful, image is produced, although the image was no less symbolic. She
typified a woman undertaking a subservient role rather than that of a
professional woman in command.
This difference between these two headmistresses may be explained
by the different social standing their schools held. Lilian M. Faithfull
was the Principal of the Cheltenham Ladies College which catered for
the comfortable middle and upper-middle-classes. Her perspective
induced her to see dress as an important tool. Cleeve had worked as a
headmistress in an ordinary High School, in an industrial town, and
provided education for the local burghers daughters. I wrote earlier,
fashion and hair are never neutral. To be successful these professional
women instinctively recognised the need to use the de rigueur of male
dress codes and blend them with female sensuousness, to make a
distinctly powerful and new sense of self.
From these three professions discussed, all exhibit the need to write
about visual attributes. They knowingly display knowledge of the
power of non-verbal communication. Knowingly, because women are
so often the objects of a male gaze, they are generally more likely to
be aware of the control visual influences have. Implicitly, some of
these roles reinforce a vision of femininity which is in fact covering
an iron resolve. In The Fashion System, Roland Barthes analyses the
signifying relationships between fashion and image. For Barthes,
fashion connotes: an essentially tyrannical authority.75 According to
Barthes: the garments most poetic reality: as a substitute for the
body, the garment, by virtue of its weight, participates in mans fun-
damental dreams [ ... ] It is a garments weight which makes it a wing
or a shroud, seduction or authority.76 Indeed, for these women it was
not seduction or authority but a distinct amalgam of the two to cre-
ate their identity in a changing society. These Edwardian women
instinctively knew how to present their different public selves, even
Self and Identity 179
181
182 Gender, Professions and Discourse
to the specific, concrete details that make memories seem more accu-
rate, thoughtful, and believable.4
Emotions are another major part of autobiographical memory.
According to Rubin: Unlike narrative and imagery, emotions are tradi-
tionally seen as outside cognition rather than as an aspect of it [ ... ]
emotions can have profound effects on autobiographical memory.5 It is
for these reasons of narrative structure, imagery and emotions that
some historians take issue with the veracity of autobiographical record-
ings. I find that the science-based case studies of Pillemer and Rubin
provide a paradigm that is an appropriate study method for the truth-
fulness of autobiography. The combination of the findings of scientific
research with the textual analysis of autobiography will help to demon-
strate that these texts can contribute to the history of consciousness of
a specific group.
This chapter is divided into two interconnected parts each of which
focuses on a different facet of truth in autobiographical memory and
narrative. The first deals with the aspect of truthful accounting and the
style of writing; an area touched on in Prefaces. Second, from this
examination of the veridical6 content, an investigation into the reliabil-
ity of memory over different time spans will be analysed, using Pillemer
and Rubins work on autobiographical memory/Personal Event Memory
(PEMs) and flashbulb memory. Rather than write a detailed synopsis of
their practice, I propose to present it by examples and analysis from the
autobiographies themselves.
The explanatory model for this discussion will concentrate on the
interesting phenomena of women who write two autobiographies, a
number of years apart, which cover a similar period.7 Storm Jamesons
No Time Like the Present, 1933, and Journey from the North vol. 1, 1969
have long periods of overlap. Thurstans, on the other hand, first
written in 1915 as Field Flying Hospital, was recalled again 63 years
later in 1978 as The Hound of War Unleashed, and covers identical peri-
ods. Using memory work theory combined with close textual analy-
sis, I will examine style, tone, and emotional temperature which may
alter but, the core original memory may be still intact and remain the
same; it is the recall of the peripheral where these changes may take
place.
Mark Freeman sums up the four main objections to autobiographical
writing as being none other than fiction:
For some, in fact, the entire genre can only be deemed hopelessly
fictional, since unlike real life, which presents us with question
Memory and Accuracy 183
Put bluntly, what the argument of this extract does show is an inability
to uncover the appropriate mtier for analysis of autobiographical texts.
The four objections raised (ellipsis, narrative style, identity/subjectivity
and memory/accuracy) are indeed part of autobiographical narrative
structure. My earlier chapter Silence facilitated a reading of elliptical
marks and textual space. Identity issues were assayed in the previous
chapter, and throughout this book a scrutiny of womens autobiograph-
ical modes has been undertaken. What remains paramount is the ques-
tion of narrative structure. We tend to equate narrative structures which
are usually vital for the readers engagement with fictionality. When an
autobiography has an explicit fictional structure, the reliability of the
memory is called into question. Rubin is useful here, as he offers an
alternative to Freemans assertions on narrative patterning: [it] does
not get in the way of accurate autobiographic reporting or interpreting
but rather, provides a framework for both telling and understanding.9
As Malcolm Chase aptly writes: All autobiographical memory is true. It
is up to the interpreter to discover in which sense, [and] for which
purpose.10
As the use of fictional narrative styles appears to be one of the most
problematic areas, I shall begin by answering the charge of false coher-
ence. There are limits for narrative structures when they present highly
coherent subjective experiences and a coherent sense of self, because a
sense of identity and subjective experience need to be contextualised.
To appear coherent, narratives need two characteristics: firstly, a range
of information and secondly, narrative organisation. The amount of
information gives the attributes of characters, scene, and the activity.
These provide important information about the setting within which
events occur. The other ingredient, narrative organisation, provides
temporal and causal dimensions. The need, stated by psychologists
Bruner and Feldman, is: To understand how a life history is told or how
184 Gender, Professions and Discourse
They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is
it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: This is
what happened; but they do not say what the person was like to
whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know
first to whom they happened.15
But the content of the diaries? [sic] can I fairly use these for checking
my own memories or should they be sent down the memory sieve?
Clearly the memories, as they come into consciousness sixty or
sixty-five years later have been censored. [sic] There is an element of
sub-conscious choice.17
Time makes its own [sic] selection for memory, and determines what
shall remain to form the distant past, and what shall disappear.
When one comes closer to the present, however, the mass of detail
overwhelms one. It is hard to see the wood for the trees, to distin-
guish the small from the great, essentials from non-essentials, that
which is of value from the trivial and absurd. There is little or no
perspective.18
the event remembered. This finding is important for the scrutiny of the
veridicality of autobiography, because it is always formed at some dis-
tance in time from the events.
It is this aspect of PEMs or autobiographical memory, those of retrieval
errors, rather than reconstruction that is evident in Violetta Thurstans
work. Because of the unusual nature of narrating the same experience
60 years apart, they provide the ideal vehicle as witness to the memory
work study. My sense is that this is the nub of the issue: that the auto-
biographers repeated use and careful location of PEMs helps us to use
them as evidence for a history of mentalities. The complexity and many
facets of core memories, differently woven over the years, need to be
studied. One further point, before presenting my analyses of these
accounts; I must confront at the outset a charge that these autobiogra-
phers simply copied and adapted from the earlier autobiographies. This
would be an obvious premise were it not for the complexity of the struc-
tural changes, tone and identities presented in the recall (alas too many
to address here). Suffice to say, as a general overview, that if these were
cases of simple stealing or reproduction of events, it would be transpar-
ent. But what they in fact show is commensurate with the scientific case
studies mentioned earlier.
An interesting example of retrieval errors occurs when Thurstan
attributes her reasons for writing her memories. In 1915 the writing of
this life story was a means of being useful during convalescence.45 In
1978, she ascribes it to a meeting with Prince Yusupov, who had fre-
quently featured in this autobiography: You must write down all this.
There are so few people now who know [ ... ] and how poignant was the
suffering of the people. [ ... ] All the time I was in Russia I used to scrib-
ble notes about the places we went to.46 The distortions between the
two autobiographies (usefulness in 1915 and instigation by a Prince in
1978 version) do not point to the unreliability of autobiography, as
many detractors would assert. It does in fact confirm Pillemer, Rubin
and others assertions that PEMs and autobiographical core memories
are sustained over the years. As Pillemer writes: Memories of personal
life episodes are generally true to the original experiences, although
specific details may be omitted or misremembered, and substantial dis-
tortions occasionally do occur.47 It would not be unreasonable to sur-
mise that in 1915, things she had taken in her stride and appeared to be
the right action, 60 years later appeared a heroic adventure. The medal
she received, accolades from peers, press, and friends, over a lifetime of
achievements, would surely present her actions in another vein.48
190 Gender, Professions and Discourse
These two accounts of Thurstans experience are when she and fellow
VADs were ordered to leave Belgium by the Germans. The first extract
is from 1915, the second 1978.
1915
I was personally very thankful not to have my belongings looked at
too closely, for I had several things I did not at all want to part with;
one was my camera, which was sewn inside my traveling cushion, a
little diary that I had kept in Belgium, and a sealed letter that had
been given me as we stood outside the station at Brussels by a lady
who had implored me to take it to England and post it for her there,
as it was to her husband in Petrograd, who had had no news of her
since the war began. I had this in an inside secret pocket. [ ... ] We
were ordered into the train ... At the next station we stopped ... we
were each given a bowl of soup. It was very good and thick [ ... ] At
Cologne [ ... ] We were ordered out of the train [ ... ] Some coffee was a
great comfort, and we were able to buy rolls and fruit for the journey
[Days later in Petrograd] One errand remained to be done. I had not
posted the letter given me by the English lady at the Brussels station
to her husband in Petrograd, wishing to have the pleasure of deliver-
ing it myself after carrying it at such risks all through Germany [ ... ]
I made inquiries for this Englishman, picturing his joy at getting the
long-deferred news of his wife ... but imagine the blow it was to hear
that he had a Russian wife in Petrograd!49
1978
Part of the Brussels station had been cleared for our large party of
about one hundred and fifty English women [ ... ] The crowd
thinned, but there were still a number of people waiting to see what
was going to happen. I felt a tug at my skirt and I looked around.
Hush, whispered a voice. Dont look at me, [sic] I want to ask you
a great favour. She produced a letter, I have not had any news of
my husband since the Boche arrived. I have no money. He must
help me. I have written to him and I ask you to take the letter. I am
so sorry, I cannot do that They are sure to search us. [ ... ] You are
English, Yes? I am Belgium, but my husband is English [ ... ] I have
no money I shall starve. She said beginning to cry. I wavered, [sic]
it seemed awful not to help this poor woman. Where is your hus-
band? He is in St Petersburg. He is a teacher of languages there. [ ... ]
the envelope had been pushed into my hand ... I hastily put it under
my left armpit [ ... ] I managed to put it under the elastic of my
Memory and Accuracy 191
knickers. I thought it would be safe there for the present. [ ... ] it was
Cologne. We were allowed a cup of coffee and a biscuit each
[Petrograd] As I threw off my dirty clothes I found in the hem of my
coat the letter [ ... ] I had folded it up small and had managed to hide
it in what I felt sure was a very safe place [ ... ]The envelope had a
Petrograd address on it and I thought I would try to find this hus-
band of hers somewhere and give myself the pleasure of telling him
I had seen his wife, [ ... ] One of the clerks at the reception knew the
name [ ... ] Oh yes, he has been here nearly a year. He is a teacher of
English, and he and his wife live quite near us. But his wife is in
Brussels! No, I assure you Madam, they have a little flat just across
the road from us. I showed him the envelope. Then I am afraid he
has two wives, Madam.50
There are two very different styles presented in these two extracts. The
first, written in 1915, is plain, informative writing without emotion;
matter-of-fact realist observation. In its simplicity there is no space for
flowery sentiment. We are told that she wrote this autobiography: in
snatches and at odd times, on all sorts of stray pieces of paper and far
from any books of reference.51 The freshness in the extract is indicative
of the whole; an immediacy that is created by her unvarnished style
and by the lack of time she had to order or make sense of the events.
Thurstan asks her co-workers to: perhaps forget the imperfections in
remembering that it has been written close to the turmoil of the battle-
field (my italics).52 This close proximity does not allow her to attribute
meaning and significance. It has a rawness which captures the mental-
ity of the time; an ethos of doing your duty without recognition would
have been natural at the time. For Thurstan, to deliver a letter was a
simple, yet risky, act of kindness. Her narrative looks out towards the
suffering of the soldiers, the peasants, and the country with an over-
arching concern for the wounded. The heroes are other people. She
records peasants fleeing: some on foot, some more fortunate ones with
their bits of furniture in a rough cart drawn by a skeleton horse or a
large dog. All had babies, aged parents, or invalids with them.53 Her
finely drawn observations replicate the suffering and allow her under-
standing and feelings for others to shine through. In this version,
Thurstan is more effaced and is more inclusive, using we and our. But,
in the telling of others misery, she tells about herself as a nurse and a
woman.
In the 1978 retelling, she places herself at the centre as a heroine,
which indeed she was. It was not until September 1917, two years after
192 Gender, Professions and Discourse
writing her first autobiography, that she was awarded the Military
medal, (one of only 20 women to be so honoured).54 Written from the
perspective of some 60 years, feted as a hero, the style became that of
romantic retrospection and romantic sentiments. She uses her novelis-
tic verve to aggrandize her achievements. The tone is intimate, persua-
sive and conversational. Her use of interrogative and exclamatory
punctuation, and reported dialogue heightens the drama. It is a style
that should bolster the immediacy and realism.
My intention here is to expand and consolidate; one, the effective-
ness of autobiographical recording and two, demonstrate how the
different identities which form from writing about the same experi-
ence do indeed provide an interpretation of the mentality of that
era. This does not mean that the autobiographer is falsifying or foist-
ing meanings onto it. From his contemporary studies, Mark Freeman
notes: What we are doing is remembering and narrating, which
means situating the experiences of the past rewriting them in
accordance with and in relation to what has happened since, as
understood and reunderstood from now, the moment of narration. 55
Therefore the cultural impact of a given era and experiences of the
autobiographer impose changes on the mentality of the writer. This
in turn, is reflective of the era it is written in, but the core memory
remains intact.
My point here in using close textual analysis is to show that, similar
to Pillemer and Rubins findings, the core remembrance of written
autobiography remains. The changes that have taken place are in the
meaning given to the episodes. These meanings are not only personal,
but help us to establish the mentality of one specific group in one spe-
cific historical period. For example, what does suffer in the second
telling is her identity as a self-effacing, sensitive and caring nurse and
woman. The pronouns we and our are rarely used and the I becomes
all too prominent. The narrative content also suffers from a sanitizing
vocabulary. The: Blood-stained uniforms hastily cut off the soldiers
were lying on the floor half-open packets of dressings were on every
locker; basins of dirty water, men were moaning in pain, calling for
water [ ... ] and the canon never ceased booming.56
This is typical of her writing in 1915. By 1978 accounts of similar
incidents were recorded: A Major told us that a very fierce battle was
going on at Mons, there was great confusion and a large number of
wounded were lying unattended.57 The horror becomes marginalized
and the import of the second autobiography has drifted to who she met
and the ensuing dialogues.
Memory and Accuracy 193
The 1933 telling is brief and bare. She draws upon a factual tone, offi-
cial discourse and newspapers and military documents as a means of
holding her emotions in check. The narration has an anonymous qual-
ity which gives the reader the bare historical facts: They leave out the
person to whom things happened.61 In 1969 Jameson uses newspapers
and military sources to give the facts but there is no bifurcation between
historical fact and emotional memory. In this retelling, Jameson went
back to what the experience felt like. Moreover the reader begins to
understand more fully the devastating effects of the First World War.
The juxtapositioning of news articles and military discourse with stir-
ring prose makes plain the nightmarish episodes of the era. The reader
is confronted with his youthfulness, untainted by experience: gawky
Memory and Accuracy 195
boy ... no lines ... slow shame-faced smile. We also learn that between
the ages of 17 and 19 he earns the D.C.M. and Military Cross. Set against
the formulated and sterile telegram, her mothers reaction to his death
is all the more heart-rending.
It appears that in her earlier remembering she found it necessary to
separate official details from emotional feelings. These are then released
in a fervent outburst, but also as a separate and distinct occurrence. The
vehemence of her emotions cannot be repressed. It is as if the concise
biography of her brothers foreshortened life was to be untouched by
her embittered emotions:
In 1932, what lying, gaping mouth will say that it was worth while to
kill my brother in his nineteenth year? You may say that the worlds
account is balanced by the item that we have with us still a number
of elderly patriots, politicians, army contractors, women who
obscenely presented white feathers. You will forgive me if, as courte-
ously as is possible in the circumstances, I say that a field latrine is
more use to humanity than these leavings.62
Here her pain is directed out towards the world. By 1969, the rancour
has subsided and she recalls her inner pain: I felt a dreadful sickness ...
which emphasised with how she imagined her brother had felt. In these
two accounts the reader is not faced so much by the problems of retrieval
or reconstruction, though there is evidence of this. What these two
extracts address thoroughly, I believe, is the place that emotion (struc-
tures of feeling), has in the history of a period. The storifying of events
in the memory and the retelling, by a competent writer, does not and
should not detract from their credibility. Lawrence Langer, a Professor
of English, suggests in his work on holocaust survivors writings that
great writers with more imagination and artistry present the greater
possibility of speaking the truth in nonfiction.63
The concerns of veridicality are addressed if we acknowledge that
autobiographical episodes take place within a time frame. This has a
temporal and spatial structure, and is linked by a causal arrangement
which has an explanatory or evaluative order. Barclay affirms that:
Without each of these aspects, narratives would be meaningless and
senseless.64 Therefore events are shaped for narrative purposes with a
view towards meaning and signification, not towards the end of some-
how preserving the facts themselves. Furthermore, the narrative organ-
isation within autobiographical narratives should not be taken as
detrimental to its veracity because memory work by psychologists
196 Gender, Professions and Discourse
198
Conclusion 199
From the outset the most striking feature uncovered was the conso-
nance within each profession, of the topic, structure, tone and style of
writing. Each profession focused on common ground which domi-
nated their writing. Headmistresses and women doctors provided
insights that in many ways were not dissimilar. Headmistresses centred
on their experiences within the confines of their institutions. Whilst
women doctors were less physically bound by institutions, they
endured far more psychological resistance from the patriarchal con-
trol within medicine. Both showed concern for their feminine image,
and the importance of feminine virtues engendered specific stylistic
devices.
The headmistresses deployed metaphors of divine providence,
Christian calling and the belief in fate to construct notions of a voca-
tional impetus. The doctors made striking use of fairytale metaphors
and metaphors from girls and boys own stories, and these helped
them to present their career choice as a vocation. But unlike headmis-
tresses, these doctors presented themselves as heroines. Their meta-
phors undercut their adopted tone of a controlled passive voice which
was imitated from male writing. The fairytale and religious meta-
phors provided a protective shield. It deflected attention away from
what could be seen as unfeminine attributes. For example, women
doctors had a highly scientific intellect and the desire to work with
the body. Throughout their autobiographies, headmistresses and doc-
tors were at pains to silence unfeminine aspects and to promote
their femininity in their visual characteristics. Their silence was a
coping mechanism. For women doctors it was a way of standing
against male hostility within the medical profession; for headmis-
tresses it evolved from the controlling power nexus of men, and from
their understanding that it was inappropriate for women to voice
opinions on religion or politics.
If we now turn to the autobiographies of nurses and Voluntary Aid
Detachments (VADs) who struggled to record horror, disorder and
confusion in estranged conditions, we experience greater stylistic
contrasts and more extreme topics. Role reversal forged another
boundary. Women in hospitals were active, and the injured were male
and supine. Had there not been a war, I would conjecture that these
women would have been the least likely of all the professions to record
their lives. In their autobiographies, language boundaries were
breached by a contrast of styles that veered from pragmatic scientific
delivery to a hiatus of immense emotion described with pace,
repetition, ellipses and free form.
200 Gender, Professions and Discourse
images addressed the way that these two aspects of the marginalia
added to the whole experience of autobiography. This investigation
challenged normative claims about the transparency of these arte-
facts, and thus raised the possibility that they operate against the
grain. In so doing, do they still reveal and develop a more extensive
self-representation?
This consonance by profession, which was deployed in the structure,
tone and style of the autobiographers, also obtains in the marginalia.
The prefatory chapters appear to function against the grain, in that
they do not prepare the reader for what is to follow. The devices in the
prefatory chapters are intended to control the way in which the reader
receives and interprets the information in the main body of the text.
Headmistresses and women doctors often chose to follow templates
provided by male autobiographers in similar professions. Artists often
preferred the modesty formula, and writers concerned themselves
with questions of veracity. Nurses and VADs who took up professional
posts after the war, (Commander-in-Chief of VADs, matrons) showed
preference for the use of metaphors, and nurses and VADs who became
professional writers after the war wrote of their concerns of veracity.
All professional writers used both metaphors and raised questions
about truthfulness. A similar control is evinced in the frontispiece
photograph.
The images have a powerful input. Selected by the autobiographer
and carried as a representative image by the reader throughout the
book, both prefatory chapters and the frontispiece image exhibit forms
of authorial control and agency. Both operate less as an expository
exercise and more as a means to deflect attention and obscure expres-
sion. The coupling of the image and prefatory chapter, in their place of
prominence, sets up certain unrealised expectations. My research indi-
cated that they are a flawed attempt at control. They are flawed because
when close textual reading and visual methodologies are used, unex-
pected signifiers can be identified. These, combined with the main
textual analysis, can provide insights into the autobiographer and the
period. Instead of closing down speculation, the cloaking mechanism
invites new areas of study and opens up fresh areas of understanding
and exposition.
Why did the majority of autobiographers do this? From the evi-
dence this far, I would conjecture that they wrote the main text, read
their text and then, in some cases, felt the need to exert control or
ameliorate the impact. In Derridian terms it [marginalia/supplement]
adds only to replace.2 It is possible that these autobiographers believed
202 Gender, Professions and Discourse
that the visual image and first statements had power to direct the
reader and affect the way that they would receive the autobiographical
information. There could be reasons of insecurity about the frank-
ness of their disclosures or a sense of propriety or concerns about
being seen in a good light. Feminine inhibitions and insecurities
may have been more prominent here. It is then necessary to recon-
sider how silences in autobiography intervene and amplify the under-
standing of the text.
The complexity of reading silences in autobiography makes a gener-
alised summary difficult. It is sufficient to reiterate that there is no such
thing as silence. My research showed that it has an identity and can be
measured. If we turn to Foucaults work in The History of Sexuality we
can see that he proposed:
There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of
the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses [ ... ] Silence
itself the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the
discretion that is required between different speakers is less the
absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated
by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the
things said, with them and in relation to them within overall
strategies. [ ... ] We must try to determine the different ways of not
saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak
of them are distributed.3
useful here. We could examine the way in which texts are framed to
see how they may enhance, define, contrast or distance the reader. We
would then examine what relationship these artefacts create between
the text and the reader and enquire how the author/text/reader
continuum is affected. They are precise authorial undertakings and
therefore are part of the overall message. Genette himself asked in
Introduction to the Paratext: How would you read Joyces Ulysses if it
were not called Ulysses?7 All titles, however innocent, influence the
reader, and this could be a useful means of furthering the debates I
raised.
Equally we need to focus attention on dedicatory passages and
nomenclature to ask how much interpretative influence they exert.
The point is how these all combine? Do they create limitations or do
they widen the prospects of comprehension? Frontispiece photo-
graphs were examined as part of the marginalia, but there is much
work that could be undertaken on the use of images throughout auto-
biographies, not just as a frontispiece. Does this change across the
professions?
Finally, during my research I unexpectedly uncovered a small number
of autobiographers who wrote more than one autobiography, several
decades apart, which covered a similar period in their lives. If one had
more space, this could be a whole research topic in its own right. The
contrast between the works of Wordsworth such as his 1805 Prelude
and his 1850 version could be an interesting point of departure. This
would be of especial interest for research into structures of meaning
and histoire de mentalits. The prospect of examining core memories
across the decades could provide valuable insights into cultural/social
change. Questions arise of subjectivity, perspective, legislation, cultural
influences and will also provide insights into memory. The use of scien-
tific psychological findings on the structure of recall could also be
invaluable in assessing veridical accuracy, and useful in the history of
autobiographical writing.
Let us put it another way. Historians, journalists and lawyers recog-
nise that witnesses are often unreliable. They forget, lie, exaggerate,
and become confused. Why should these autobiographers be any dif-
ferent? True, the borderline between fact and fiction is fluid, but the
evidential basis on which much history is written is thin. Simon
Schama began his book, Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations,
with an eye-witness scene.8 At the end of the book he reveals that the
narration was a fiction, formed from a number of contemporary
206 Gender, Professions and Discourse
1 Introduction
1. For example, C.F.G. Mastermann, The Condition of England (Methuen 1960,
1st pub. [1909]); Arnold Bennett, Our Women, Chapters on the Sex Discord
(Cassell 1920); Sir Almroth Wright, Letter to the Editor of The Times on
Militant Suffragettes in Dale Spender, ed. The Education Papers, Womens Quest
for Equality in Britain: 18501912 (New York & London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1987).
2. Trev Broughton, Auto/biography and the Actual Course of Things, in Tess
Cosslett, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield, eds., Feminism and Autobiography:
Texts, Theories, Methods (Routledge, 2000), p. 242.
3. Maroula Joannou, Ladies Please Dont Smash These Windows (Oxford: Berg
Publishers, 1995); Nicola Beauman, A Very Great Profession (Virago, 1983); Alison
Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars
(Routledge, 1991); Claire Tylee, Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Womens
Writing 19141962 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990); Valentine Cunningham,
British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
4. Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1960); James Olney, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and
Critical (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Mary Evans, Missing
Persons: The Impossibility of Auto/biography (Routledge, 1999); Gail Braybon,
Evidence, History & the Great War: Historians & the Impact of 191418 (New
York & Oxford: Berghann Books, 2005).
5. Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain:
18321920 (New York: OUP, 1991); Claire M. Tylee, The Great War and Womens
Consciousness (MacMillan Press, 1990).
6. Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate, eds., Womens Fiction and the Great War (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1997); Joannou, op. cit.; Julia Bush, Ladylike Lives? Upper
Class Womens Autobiographies and the Politics of Late Victorian and
Edwardian Britain, Literature & History, vol. 10, no. 2, 2001, pp. 4261.
7. William Lamont ed. Historical Controversies and Historians (University College
London Press, 1998).
8. The first use of autography is given in the OED as 1644, as the action of
writing with ones own hand; the authors own hand-writing. In 1796 in a
review of DIsraelis Miscellanies, in an essay entitled: Some Observations
on Diaries, Self-Biography, and Self-Characters autobiography is used.
According to the OED the prefix auto becomes prevalent in the nineteenth
century, but is most usually attached to scientific terms. This could account
for some of the problems that arise about the term autobiography and the
expectations from a text thus named.
207
208 Notes
31. Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 1985, p. 3.
32. Ibid., p. 3.
33. L. Anderson, T. Broughton, eds., Womens Lives/Womens Times: New
Essays on Auto/biography (New York: State University of New York Press),
1997.
34. Cosslett, op. cit., p. 5.
35. Jo Spence, Putting Myself in the Picture: A Political, Personal, and Photographical
Autobiography (Camden Press, 1986); Jo. Spence and Patricia Holland, Family
Snaps (Virago, 1991), pp. 226237; Stanley, op. cit., pp. 4554; Annette
Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (London & New York:
Verso, 1995); J. Stacey, Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (Routledge,
1997).
36. Kuhn, ibid. This is on the dust jacket.
37. Evans, op. cit., p. 2.
38. Ibid. p. 2.
39. Ibid. p. 143.
40. Benstock, op. cit., p. 2.
41. Susan Stanford Friedman, Womens Autobiographical Selves: Theory and
Practice, in Benstock, op. cit., pp. 3462.
42. Patricia Waugh, Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Post-Modern (Routledge,
1989).
43. Benstock, op. cit., p. 2.
44. Julia Bush, op. cit., pp. 5859.
45. Cosslett, op. cit., p. 1.
46. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977), pp. 134135.
47. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Vintage, 2000, 1st pub. In Britain
in 1982 by Jonathan Cape).
48. Campbell in Lamont, op. cit., p. 194.
49. Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Sicle
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).
50. David Powell, The Edwardian Crisis: Britain, 19011914 (Basingstoke:
MacMillan, 1996), p. 95.
51. For example: 1902 the training of Midwives was introduced; 1903, the
Society for Promoting Reforms in the Marriage and Divorce Laws of England
was formed; 1906 Education Act provided food for schoolchildren, and
medical inspections followed in 1907; 1911 National Insurance Act included
maternity benefits; Old Age Pensions Act, 1908; 1918 Education Act, and a
Maternity and Child Welfare Act; in 1919 a major Housing Act, and an act
establishing a Ministry of Health, Arthur Marwick, The Deluge (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 1991).
52. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Sicle
(Bloomsbury, 1991).
53. Anne Wiltshire, Most Dangerous Women (Pandora, 1985).
54. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 18751914 (Abacus, 1999), p. 202.
55. Ibid., p. 202.
56. Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism & Sexuality, 18801930
(Pandora, 1985), p. 86.
210 Notes
2 Headmistresses
1. Sara Delamont, Knowledgeable Women: Structuralism and the Reproduction of
Elites (Routledge, 1989); Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian
and Edwardian England (Routledge, 1981); June Purvis, A History of Womens
Education in England (Milton Keynes & Philadelphia: Open University Press,
1991); G. Partington, Women Teachers in the Twentieth Century (Slough:
NFER, 1976).
2. Camilla Stivers, Reflections of the Role of Personal Narrative in Social
Science, Signs, vol. 18, 1993, pp. 408425 (pp. 411412).
3. Meagan Morris and Paul Patton, Foucault, Power, Truth and Strategy (Sydney:
Feral Publishers, 1978) p. 8.
4. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
(New York: Vintage Random, 1973), p. ix.
5. Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York:
Vintage Books, 1995), p. 171.
6. Stivers, op. cit., pp. 408425.
7. James Bryce, Assistant Commissioner to the Schools Inquiry Commission
in the 1860s, noted that this appears to have remained within these social
groups until the First World War. Purvis, op. cit., p. 68.
8. Lower, middle-classes were clerks, warehousemen, shopkeepers with the
highest grade of artisans. Dyhouse, op. cit., p. 41. These had a family
Notes 211
75. Octavia Wilberforce, The Autobiography of a Pioneer Woman Doctor, ed. Pat
Jalland (Cassell Publishers, 1989), p. 124.
76. Foucault (1995), op. cit., p. 172.
77. Anthony Elliot, Concepts of Self (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), p. 84.
78. Gray, op. cit., p. 239.
79. Ibid., p. 69.
80. Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (Sage Publications, 1993), p. 90.
81. Martha Vicinus, op. cit., p. 38.
82. Delamont, op. cit., p. 149.
83. Burstall, op. cit., p. 26.
84. Burstall, op. cit., p. 71.
85. Delamont, op. cit., p. 147.
86. Bertha Ruck, A Story-Teller Tells the Truth (Hutchinson, 1935), p. 115.
87. Vicinus, op. cit., p. 291.
88. Ibid., p. 65.
89. Faithfull, op. cit., p. 6.
90. Ibid., p. 66.
91. Ibid., p. 67.
92. Ibid., p. 67.
93. Vicinus, op. cit., p. 158.
94. Sheila Jeffreys, Spinsterhood and Celibacy, in The Spinster and Her Enemies:
Feminism and Sexuality 18801930 (Pandora, 1985), pp. 8697.
95. Barlow, op. cit., p. 27.
96. Ibid., p. 28.
97. Ibid., p. 85.
98. Ibid., p. 31.
99. Ibid., p. 84.
100. Ibid., pp. 84, 85.
101. Ibid., p. 85.
102. Ibid. p. 85.
103. Partington, op. cit., p. 60; Dyhouse, op. cit., pp. 5966.
104. Cleeve, op. cit., p. 39.
105. Ibid., p. 202.
106. Ibid., p. 207.
107. Ibid. p. 207.
108. Ibid., p. 198.
109. Ibid., pp. 233, 234.
110. Ibid., p. 233.
111. Ibid., p. 212.
112. Foucault (1995), op. cit., p. 194.
113. Sara Burstall, English High Schools for Girls, Their Aims, Organisation, and
Management (Longmans, Green), 1907, p. 58.
114. Gray, op. cit., p. 250.
115. W.B. Yeats, The Lake of Innsfree, in Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter,
Jon Stallworthy, eds., The Norton Anthology of Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1996),
p. 1084, in Cleeve, op. cit., p. 212.
116. Burstall, op. cit., p. 257.
117. Ibid., p. 257.
118. Faithfull, op. cit., p. 280.
214 Notes
3 Women Doctors
1. Elizabeth Blackwell (18211910) Her family immigrated to the United
States, where in 1844 she decided to become a doctor. Medical school
refused to enrol her, so she studied privately until 1847 when she gained
entrance to the Geneva Medical School in New York State. Awarded MD in
1849 and studied in London at St Bartholomews. In 1875 helped to found
the London School of Medicine for Women. Biographical Dictionary of
Women (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1998, p. 71).
2. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 18751914 (Britain: Abacus, 1999),
p. 212.
3. Ibid., p. 212.
4. Carol Dyhouse, Driving Ambitions: Women in Pursuit of a Medical
Education, 18901939, Womens History Review, vol. 7, no. 3, 1998.
5. Carol Dyhouse, Women Students and the London Medical Schools,
191439: The Anatomy of Masculine Culture, Gender History vol. 10, no. 1,
April 1998, pp. 110132.
6. Thomas Neville Bonner, To the Ends of the Earth: Womens Search for
Education in Medicine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1992), p. 10.
7. Salmon, E.J., What Girls Read, The Nineteenth Century, October 1886,
pp. 515529, quoted in Kimberley Reynolds, Girls Only? Gender and
Popular Childrens Fiction in Briton, 18801910 (Harvester, 1990), p. 93.
8. Elizabeth Bryson, Look Back in Wonder (Dundee: David Winter & Son Ltd,
1967), p. 161.
9. Ibid., p. 194.
10. Bonner, op. cit., p. 128.
11. Ibid., p. 127.
12. Isabel Hutton, CBE, MD, Memories of a Doctor in War and Peace (Heinemann,
1960), p. 39.
13. Ibid., p. 136.
14. Dr. Caroline Matthews, Experiences of a Woman Doctor in Serbia (Mills &
Boon, 1916); Dr. Flora Murray, Women as Army Surgeons (Hodder and
Stoughton, 1920); Dr. Mary Scharlieb, Reminiscences (William and Norgate,
1924); Dr Ida Mann, The Chase (Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre Press,
1986); Dr. Octavia Wilberforce, The Autobiography of a Pioneer Woman
Doctor ed. Pat Jalland (Cassell Publishers, 1989). In the larger sample of my
research the bulk of the doctors use fairytale and childhood fiction. I have
just focused on three doctors for clarity.
15. Dyhouse, Driving Ambitions, op. cit., p. 321.
16. Ibid., p. 327.
17. Ibid., pp. 322324.
18. David Luke, ed. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: Selected Tales (Penguin,
1982), p. 12.
Notes 215
19. Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (New York: Routledge, 1983),
p. 18.
20. Ibid., p. 24.
21. Ibid., p. 24.
22. A.S. Byatt, Introduction in Maria Tatar, The Annotated Brothers Grimm
(W. W. Norton, 2004).
23. Zipes, op. cit., p. 33.
24. Murray Knowles and Kirsten Malmkjaer, Language and Control in Childrens
Literature (London & New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 53.
25. Sally Mitchell, The New Girl: Girls Culture in England, 18801915 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 14, 43.
26. Reynolds, op. cit., p. 103.
27. Ibid., p. 103.
28. Mitchell, op. cit., p. 15.
29. Knowles and Malmkjaer, op. cit., p. 83.
30. Ibid., pp. 88, 111.
31. Ibid., pp. 89, 93.
32. Mitchell, op. cit., pp. 112, 119.
33. Ibid., pp. 103138.
34. Ibid., p. 15.
35. Ibid., p. 22.
36. Bryson, op. cit., p. 162; Hutton, op. cit., p. 39; Mann, op. cit., p. 16;
Wilberforce, op. cit., p. 3.
37. Bryson, op. cit., pp. 79.
38. Ibid., p. 5.
39. Ibid., p. 5.
40. Ibid., p. 5.
41. Ibid., p. 5.
42. Ibid., p. 44.
43. Bonner, op. cit., p. 10.
44. Bryson, op. cit., p. 54.
45. Ibid., p. 54.
46. Ibid., p. 7.
47. Ibid., p. 19.
48. Ibid., p. 20.
49. Ibid., p. 17.
50. Ibid., p. 15.
51. Ibid., p. 15.
52. Ibid., p. 57.
53. Ibid., p. 26.
54. Ibid., p. 28.
55. Ibid., p. 28.
56. Warner, Marina, From The Beast to the Blonde: on Fairy Tales and Their Tellers
(Vintage, 1995), p. xvi.
57. Dr. Gladys Wauchope, The Story of a Woman Physician (Bristol: John
Wright & Sons, 1963) p. 16.
58. Ibid., p. 16.
59. Ibid., p. 15.
60. Ibid., p. 13.
216 Notes
6 Women Writers
1. Claire M. Tylees bibliography provides an excellent listing year by year, of
primary sources, and is helpful starting-point for locating forgotten works
by women. The Great War and Womens Consciousness: Images of Militarism
and Womanhood in Womens Writings, 191464 (Oxford University Press,
1997). For further detail, Sandra Kemp, Charlotte Mitchell and David
Notes 221
9 Silences
1. Susan Sontag, A Susan Sontag Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 187.
2. Wilhelm Dilthey in H. P. Rickman, ed. Pattern and Meaning in History
(Harper & Row, 1961); James Olney, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and
Critical (Princeton: Princeston University Press, 1980); Mary Jean Corbett,
Representing Femininity, Middle Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian
Womens Autobiographies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Simon
Denlith, The Uses of Autobiography, Literature and History Journal, vol. 14,
no. 1, 1988; Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation
in Britain, 18321920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Mary
Evans, Missing Persons: The Impossibility of Auto/biography (Routledge, 1999);
Laura Marcus, Autobiographical Discourses (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1994); Julia Swindells, The Uses of Autobiography (Taylor &
Francis 1995).
3. Dale Spender, Man Made Language (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987).
4. Tillie Olsen, Silences (New York: Delacorte Press, 1978), p. 6.
5. Roland Barthes, Image Music Text (Fontana Press, 1977); Patricia Ondek
Laurence, The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Pierr Macherey, A Theory of
Literary Production (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); Budick & Iser, Languages
of the Unsayable (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
6. Laurence, op. cit., p. 57.
7. Macherey, op. cit., pp. 8289.
8. John Cage, Silences (Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), p. 7.
9. Sontag, op. cit., pp. 181204.
10. Ibid., p. 187.
11. Dame Laura Knight, Oil Paint and Grease Paint (Ivor Nicholson & Watson),
p. 122.
12. Marion Cleeve, Fire Kindleth Fire: The Professional Autobiography of Marion
Cleeve (London & Glasgow: Blackie & Son, 1930); Frances R. Gray, Gladly,
Gladly a Book about Learning and Teaching (Sampson Low, Marston, no date).
Notes 227
13. Lilian M. Faithfull, In the House of My Pilgrimage (Chatto & Windus, 1925),
p. 265.
14. Amy Barlow, Seventh Child the Autobiography of a Schoolmistress (Gerald
Duckworth, 1969), p. 90.
15. Barlow, op. cit., p. 95.
16. Ibid., pp. 83, 84, 85.
17. Dr Gladys Wauchope, The Story of a Woman Physician (Bristol: John
Wright & Sons, 1963), p. 46.
18. Octavia Wilberforce, The Autobiography of a Pioneer Woman Doctor (Cassell
Publishers, 1989), p. 64.
19. Mathilde Verne, Chords of Remembrance (Hutchinson, 1936), p. 32.
20. Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study (Hogarth Press, 1936).
21. Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (Sage Publications, 1993), p. 188.
22. Ibid., p. 192.
23. Ibid., p. 179.
24. Vieda Skultan, Silence and the Shortcomings of Narrative, Auto/Biography,
IX (1 and 2) 2001, pp. 310, p. 5.
25. Macherey, op. cit., p. 87.
26. Ibid., p. 85.
27. Ibid., p. 87.
28. Bertha Ruck, A Story-Teller Tells the Truth (Hutchinson, 1935), p. 93.
29. Lillah McCarthy, Myself and My Friends (Thornton Butterworth,
1933), p. 66.
30. Ibid., p. 89.
31. Ibid., p. 233.
32. Ibid., p. 124.
33. Ibid., p. 151.
34. May Wedderburn-Cannan, Grey Ghosts and Voice (Kineton: The Roundwood
Press, 1976), p. 28.
35. Iser, Wolfgang, Prospecting from Reader Response to Literary Anthropology
(Baltimore & London: John Hopkins University Press, 1989), in Skultan,
op. cit., p. 5.
36. Liza Lehmann, The Life of Liza Lehmann (T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd. 1919),
pp. 110, 161.
37. McCarthy, op. cit., p. 130.
38. Ibid., p. 130.
39. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 An Introduction (Penguin
Books, 1976), p. 27.
40. M.A. St. Clair Stobart, Miracles and Adventures (Rider, 1935), p. 86.
41. Ibid., p. 82.
42. Ibid., p. 88.
43. Cannan, op. cit., pp. 48, 55, 65.
44. Ibid., p. 120.
45. Ibid., p. 82.
46. Ibid., p. 86.
47. Ibid., p. 140.
48. Ibid., p. 140.
49. Ibid., p. 144.
50. Lehmann, op. cit., p. 94.
228 Notes
10. John Tosh, The Pursuit of History (3rd edition) (Harlow: Pearson Education,
2000), p. 190.
11. Ibid., p. 213.
12. Lamont, op. cit., p. 190.
13. Ibid., p. 194.
14. Lucien Febvre: A New Kind of History from the Writings of Febvre, Peter Burke
ed. (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973).
15. The vividness of the memory suggests the photographic flashbulb meta-
phor. See following chapter for full analysis.
16. Theodore Adorno, Subject and Object, in Lamont, op. cit., p. 402.
17. Jerome Bruner, Life as Narrative, Social Research, vol. 54, p. 31.
18. David Rubin, Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 1.
19. Netta Syrett, The Sheltering Tree (Geoffrey Bles, 1939), Preface.
20. Ren Konig, The Restless Image: A Sociology of Fashion (George Allen & Unwin,
1973).
21. Ledger, Sally, The New Woman, Fiction and Feminism at the fin de sicle
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) p. 1.
22. Ibid., p. 1.
23. Anthony Cascardi, The Subject of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992); Roy Porter, Rewriting the Self: Histories from the
Renaissance to the Present (Routledge, 1997).
24. Roger Smith in Porter, op. cit., p. 56.
25. Carolyn D. Williams, Another Self in the Case: Gender, Marriage and the
Individual in Augustan Literature, in Porter, op. cit., pp. 97118 (p. 98).
26. Enlightenment thinkers such as Addison, Mandeville and Fielding, see
E.J. Hundert, The European Enlightenment and the History of the Self
pp. 7283, in Porter, op. cit.
27. Ibid., p. 80.
28. Wordsworth believed that communing with nature was the way to get back
in touch with the self.
29. Anthony Elliot, Concepts of the Self (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), p. 9.
30. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press,
1990), p. 34.
31. Elliot, op. cit., p. 6.
32. Taylor, op. cit., p. 34.
33. A random selection of dates shows the following coverage, under various
titles, that women received: 20 Feb. 1906, Womens Suffrage; 3 March
1906, Womens Suffrage Movement; 10 and 12 March 1906, Womens
Demonstrations; 19, 23, 25, 26, 29 31 October 1906, Suffrage; 5 November
1906, Suffrage Demonstration in Trafalgar Square; 1 November1906,
Deputation to Mr J. Morley; 7 November 1906, Suffragettes Imprisoned;
10 March 1908, Womens Suffrage: Economic Aspect; 18 January 1908,
Suffrage and the Cabinet; January March 1910, contained suffrage arti-
cles on each day. Once war was declared and suffrage demands suspended,
a more inclusive journalism takes over. January to March 1915, for example,
Women Doctors, Women for Farm Work, Women Gardeners, Women
and the Law, Women and Medicine, Women Musicians, New Professions
230 Notes
for Women, Women Tram Conductors, Women and War Work, Women,
Dress and War, etc.
34. A Woman Who Writes For Her Bread, The Times, 16 July 1907.
35. Ethel Raglan, Memories of Three Reigns (Eveleigh Nash & Grayson, 1928),
p. 233.
36. Ibid., p. 21.
37. The Guardian, From the Archives 3 July 2004.
38. Raglan, op. cit., p. 232.
39. This replicates Coopers idiosyncratic spacing. Diana Cooper, The Rainbow
Comes and Goes (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958), p. 82.
40. Raglan, op. cit., p. 238.
41. Lilian M. Faithfull, In the House of My Pilgrimage (Chatto & Windus, 1925), p. 9.
42. Bertha Ruck, A Story-Teller Tells the Truth (Hutchinson, 1935), p. 80.
43. Ibid., p. 80.
44. Baroness de TSerclaes, Flanders and Other Fields (George G. Harrap,
1964), p. 34.
45. Sara Burstall, English High School for Girls: Their Aims, Organisation, and
Management (Longmans, Green, 1907), p. 15.
46. Dr Gladys Wauchope, The Story of a Woman Physician (Bristol: John
Wright & Sons, 1963), p. 15.
47. Dr Mary Scharlieb, Reminiscences (Williams and Norgate, 1924), p. 77.
48. Faithfull, op. cit., p. 11.
49. Ibid., p. 59.
50. Ibid., p. 8.
51. Marion Cleeve, Fire Kindleth Fire: The Professional Autobiography of Marion
Cleeve (London& Glasgow: Blackie & Son, 1930), p. 83.
52. Rita Humphreys, Recollections of a Literary Life (Andrew Melrose, 1936),
p. 100.
53. Ibid., p. 218.
54. Ibid., p. 258.
55. Frances Gray, Gladly, Gladly: a Book about Learning and Teaching (Sampson
Low, Marston, no date), p. 226.
56. Dr Elizabeth Bryson, Look Back in Wonder (Dundee: David Winter & Son,
1966), p. 126.
57. Ibid., p. 189.
58. Lillah McCarthy, Myself and My Friends (Thornton Butterworth, 1933), p. 190.
59. Ibid., p. 174.
60. Ibid., p. 174.
61. Ibid., p. 174.
62. Arabella, Kenealy, How Women Doctors are Made, in The Ludgate, 1897,
IV May, pp. 2935. Also, Scharlieb, op. cit., p. 51, Wauchope, op. cit.,
p.45, headmistresses, Faithfull, op. cit., p. 178, Burstall, op. cit., p. 250,
Cleeve, op. cit., p. 178
63. Dr Isabel Hutton, Memories of a Doctor in War & Peace (Heinemann,
1960), p. 18.
64. Ibid., p. 18.
65. Ibid., pp. 100101.
Notes 231
66. Sir Almroth Wright, Letter to the Editor of the Times on Militant Suffragettes,
(1912), in Dale Spender, ed., The Education Papers: Womens Quest for Equality
in Britain, 18501912 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987).
67. Faithfull, op. cit., p. 101.
68. Ibid., p. 102.
69. Ibid., p. 148.
70. Peter Corrigan, Dressing in Imaginary Communities: Clothing, Gender
and the Body in Utopian Texts from Thomas Moore to Feminist Scifi in
Body and Society, vol. 2, no. 3 September 1996, pp. 89106.
71. Cleeve, op. cit., p. 82.
72. Ibid., p. 82.
73. Ibid., p. 15.
74. Ibid., p. 17.
75. Roland Barthes, The Fashion System (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983),
1st pub., 1967, p. 38.
76. Ibid., p. 126.
77. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage
Books, 1995), 1st pub. 1977.
78. Camilla Stivers, Reflections of the Role of Personal Narrative in Social
Science, Signs, 18, 1993, pp. 408425.
79. Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography (Minnesota: University of Minnesota
Press, 1989), p. 171.
9. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions (New York: Oxford University Press Inc
1998) in Schacter, op. cit., p. 15.
10. Malcolm Chase, Autobiography and the Understanding of the Self: the Case
of Allen Davenport. In Martin Hewitt, Ed. Representing Victorian Lives: Leeds
Working Papers in Victorian Studies Volume 2 (University of Leeds, 1999),
pp. 1426, p. 19.
11. Jerome Bruner, Carol Feldman, Group Narrative as a Cultural Context of
Autobiography, in Rubin, op. cit., pp. 291317.
12. Rubin, op. cit., p. 2.
13. Estelle C. Jelinek, Womens Autobiography: Essays in Criticism (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 17.
14. Virginia Woolf, The Collected Essays Vol. IV (The Hogarth Press, 1967),
p. 208.
15. Woolf, A Sketch, 1907 (1978 ed.) op. cit., p. 75.
16. Lilian M. Faithfull, You and I (Chatto & Windus, 1928), p. 147.
17. Naomi Mitchison, Small Talk (Bodley Head. Uncorrected proof copy.
1973), p. 26.
18. Faithfull, op. cit., p. 147.
19. Sven-Ake Christianson and Martin A. Safer, Emotional events and
Emotions in Autobiographical Memories, in Rubin, op. cit., pp. 218243,
p. 222.
20. Mitchison, op. cit., p. 25.
21. Craig R. Barclay, Autobiographical Remembering: Narrative Constraints on
Objectified Selves, in Rubin, op. cit., pp. 94128, p. 100.
22. Diana Cooper, The Rainbow Comes and Goes (Rupert Hart-Davis,1958);
Florence Farmborough, Nurse at the Russian Front (Constable, 1974); Dame
Katharine Furze, Hearts and Pomegranate (Peter Davies,1940); Freya Stark,
Travellers Prelude (John Murray, 1950); Octavia Wilberforce, The Autobiography
of a Pioneer Woman Doctor (Cassell, 1989).
23. Mrs. Desmond Rita Humphreys, Recollections of a Literary Life (Andrew
Melrose, 1936) p. 181.
24. Isadora Duncan, My Life (Gollancz, 1928). P. 339.
25. Steen F. Larsen, Charles P. Thompson, and Tia Hansen. Time in
Autobiographical Memory, in Rubin op. cit., p. 130.
26. Ibid., p. 130.
27. Rubin, op. cit., p. 3.
28. Ibid., p. 3.
29. Pillemer, op. cit., p. 53.
30. Dr. Caroline Matthews, Experiences of a Woman Doctor in Serbia (Mills &
Boon, 1916), p. 31.
31. Pillemer, op. cit., p. 53.
32. Ibid., p. 54.
33. Ibid., p. 53
34. William F. Brewer, What is Recollective Memory? in Rubin, op. cit., p. 39.
35. Elizabeth Bryson, Look Back in Wonder (Dundee: David Winter & Son,
1939), p. 27.
36. Pillemer, op. cit., p. 273.
37. Brewer, op. cit., p. 39.
Notes 233
12 Conclusion
1. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press, 1976), p. xiii.
2. Ibid., p. 145.
234 Notes
Notes: Entries in this index are arranged letter-by-letter order. Image references
are shown in bold print.
235
236 Index
feminine, 45, 512, 98, 1278 Furze, Dame Katharine (VAD), 57, 135
boundaries of, 75 Fussell, Paul (historian), 5
definition of, 37, 38, 678
myths of, 45 General Practitioners (GPs) see
unfeminine, 38, 42, 48, 199 doctors
virtues, 22 Genette, Gerard (theorist), 2045
fiction, 86, see also Edwardian Girls Public Day School Trust, 21, 26
novelists Glyn, Elinor (low-brow novelist) 88,
fin de sicle, 13, 165, see also 8990, 91, 945, 96, 97, 99100,
Edwardian novelists 1245, 125, 127, 139
First World War, 3, 4, 5, 14, 37, 38, 94, governesses, 18
see also nurses; chpts. on memory Governesses Benevolent Institution,
forewards, see prefaces 18, 33
form and content disunity, 603 Gray, Francis (Headmistress), 24, 25,
Foucault, Michel, 17, 167 30, 43, 117, 119, 11921, 127,
disciplinary power, 18, 26, 334 1723, see also narrative
hierarchical observation, 26, 27,
289, 32, 35, 834 hair see fashion, hair and dress
institutionalisation, 17, 26, 27, 83 headmistresses, 14, 2252, 23
normalising judgement, 267, 356 ambition, 30
power of dress, 189 celibacy, 22, 30
silences, 67, 69, 144, 202 curriculum, 21
see also headmistresses; silences destiny, divine calling, fate, service,
Freeman, Mark (historian), 223, 199
autobiography as fiction, 1823, illness, 289
192 institutionalisation, 259
Freud, Sigmund (psychiatrist), 15 marriage, 212, 29, 30, 313
sexology, 31 maternal instincts, 2930
silence, 1489, 167 narrative style, 1467
frontispiece images, 12, 10729, 201 pay and conditions, 19
amateur/family album, 11, 1167, prefaces, 132, 1356, 1378
1245, 126, 128 religion, 17
as child, 1114 restrictions, 18
concealment/masking/myth- retirement, 17, 20, 346
making, 114, 116, 1224, 126, spinsterhood, 17, 29, 31, 79
128, 129 teaching, 17, 267
control, 201 unfeminine, 223, 29
portrait, 125 vocation/service, 25, 199
portrait conventions, 1113, 26 see also careers; marriage; individual
revealing, 126; names
selection of images, 25 Hegel, on prefaces, 140
signification, 11113 histoire de mentalits, 12, 163, 165, 189,
studio portraits, 11113, 114, 116, 191, 196, 198, 2023, 205, see also
117, 121, 1224, 1267, 128 Annales School
truth 117, 126, 129 history
unreliability of, 3, 89, 11124, cultural, 13, 181
1289 social, 13
see also images; photographs; Roland history of consciousness see histoire de
Barthes; visual codes mentalits
238 Index