Love, Desire and Melancholy

Inspired by Constance Maynard (1849-1935)

Angharad Eyre, Jane Mackelworth, Elsa Richardson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351849845
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Originally inspired by the digitisation of the autobiographical writings of Constance Maynard, this volume considers women's historical experience of sexuality through the frame of the history of emotions. Constance Maynard (1849-1935) rose to prominence as the first Mistress and Principal of Westfield College, holding that position from 1882 to 1913. However, her writings offer more than an insight into the movement for women's higher education. As pioneering feminist scholars such as Martha Vicinus have discovered, Maynard's life writings are a valuable source for scholars of gender and sexuality. Writing about her relationships with other women teachers and students, Maynard attempted to understand her emotions and desires within the frame of her evangelical religious culture.

The contributions to this volume draw out the significance of Maynard's writings for the histories of gender, sexuality, religion, and the emotions. Interdisciplinary in nature, they use the approaches of literary studies, architecture studies, and life writing to understand Maynard and her historical significance. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women's History Review.

Constance Maynard’s Languages of Love

Pauline Phipps

This article chronicles my almost twenty-year academic journey through the archives at Queen Mary University of London UK (QMUL) for the purpose of researching the life of Constance Maynard (1849–1935). Maynard helped to found Westfield College (now QMUL) as a Christian-based college providing women with new university degrees, and she was Mistress of it for thirty-one years. This article begins by reviewing the scholarly literature behind my queer-gender-sex framework for interpreting Maynard’s often contradictory narratives in her diaries and autobiography. I then illustrate how these records are disclosures of her tribulations as an educational leader whose atonement theology shaped her life. This study of Maynard’s records of her life experiences, especially her religious-secularist language(s) of love, contributes to reinterpretations of gender-sex-power binaries, when most Victorian women were supposed to be sexually pure, subservient, and confined to the home.

Personal records are considered to be the foundation of historical research, and those of the relatively unknown English educational reformer, Constance Louisa Maynard (1849–1935), do not disappoint. Her archives, located at Queen Mary University of London, inspired my biography of a successful yet self-tormented woman whose Evangelical-based atonement theology shaped every aspect of her life. Indeed, Maynard adopted faith to justify her possible sexual liaisons with young college women while insisting they practice celibacy for God. She did not view her same-sex behaviour as aberrant. ‘Sex feeling’ was after all that between a man and a woman. The true Christian ‘must relinquish’ all feeling for salvation in the Hereafter.¹

Maynard’s archives are more compelling for the history of female sexuality because she lived before and during radical changes in ideas about sexuality. When she learned of the new psychoanalytical theories that classified ‘normal’ (heterosexual) versus ‘abnormal’ (all other) sexuality, the elderly Maynard still claimed her past college friendships were faith-based, even as her own self-perceptions about same-sex desire slowly evolved. Nor did she perceive her power-based interaction with students as we might today. Maynard’s life story confounds the usual activities and meanings normally attributed to late-Victorian femininity and sexuality.²

Most historians strive for objective solidly-grounded findings, but an archive as rich as Maynard’s seduces our identification with raw materials. This researcher was tempted to imagine inhabiting—even ‘knowing’ – a world quite different to her own.³ Yet as Carol Mavor notes, ‘flirting’ with the past ‘keeps our subjects alive’, and our research stays ‘ripe for further enquiry’. In other words, we should be creative in the archive and be prepared to re-think our methods according to what we might discover. Laura Doan advises historians to critically ‘“look through” the archives to see what is unknown’ rather than to provide answers to questions that we already know. Sally Newman’s finding ‘traces of desire’ in a single postcard, for example, culminated in her alternate reading of Victorian Vernon Lee’s same-sex past.⁴ This article traces my personal journey through the archive and scholarly domain to illustrate how this researcher was implicated in reconstructing Maynard’s sexual past.

Historiography on Havelock Ellis’ new theories of ‘same-sex deviance’ suggests that sexology had little impact upon late-Victorian women’s sexuality. Sex between women was inconceivable to society, and thus, their erotic relations were acclaimed as wholesome precursors to heterosexual love and marriage. The idea of romantic friendship seemed vital to Maynard. Socially ostracized as a single educational pioneer, she had ‘a deeply rooted hunger’ for college women’s ‘love’.⁵ Even so, the nature of her bonds remains obscure because she similarly to the few other women who left records during this era, adopted a typical late-Victorian propriety about sex. Women’s silence about same-sex acts prompted pioneering historians to assume varied stances on the contribution of romantic friendship to the history of sexuality that featured their erotic-platonic nuances.⁶ Current scholarship follows Judith Butler’s and others idea of identity formation(s) as fluid, interchangeable constructs that evolve over time. Nonetheless, as Doan has recently noted, the focus on portraying sexuality as identit(ies) obfuscates sexuality as tool(s) of power, which has been excluded from studies on sexuality and lesbian history due to its connotations of female-female sexual abuse.⁷ Maynard’s archives, however, suggest that hierarchical-based eroticisms in female relationships were prominent in her diverse experiences as an educational pioneer.

My interpretations of Maynard’s relationships with women were inspired by recent insights of historians, Sharon Marcus, Anna Clark, and Julian Carter. Their re-interpretation of such bonds as that between friends, sisters, and mother-daughter as being a shared femininity rather than a lesbian or incestuous one, helps clarify how such forms of intimacy did not de-stabilize Victorian heteronormativity. In addition, while Victorians encouraged feminine ‘attributes’ of passion, piety, and altruism, their romantic friendship created opportunities for women to explore forms of desire and aggression they could not display in relation to men. Such theoretical queering of femininity helped in my analysis of Maynard’s particular same-sex experiences as an educational pioneer.⁸

A similar argument can be made about the fluidity of the relations between gender, sex and religion. Faith was crucial to Maynard’s understanding of her same-sex self-consciousness and her power as an educational pioneer. Yet surprisingly little scholarship has examined Victorian women’s interconnection of faith, ambition, and desire: historians of women have tended to focus on women’s use of faith for social demands, whereas Victorianists have placed sexology at the center of late-Victorian/Edwardian thinking about sex.⁹ It is only recently that such scholars as Joy Dixon, Lesley Hall, and Sue Morgan have recognized that the intermingling of discourses of sex with issues of faith was as distinct to late-Victorian women’s experiences as it has been for individuals in all ages. Meanwhile Frederick Roden’s and others ‘queering’ of Victorian religion reveals how some women adapted their faith to transgress a patriarchal society tolerant of female friendship.¹⁰

My initial interest in Maynard’s archives was inspired by Martha Vicinus’ allusion to Maynard in her groundbreaking work on bonds among college women. Vicinus explained college ‘raves’ as vital to college women’s fight for higher education to gain independence from prescribed domesticity. A rave was largely demonstrated through pious husband-wife role playing even if it was seen by college women and society as a romantic friendship sublimated to heterosexual role-playing. Writing in 1982, Vicinus described Maynard as an emotionally naive pioneer, who ‘hid behind a façade of self-effacing Christianity’ rather ‘than admit her power’.¹¹ My own reading of Maynard’s private writing would in contrast compel me to describe her as a powerful woman who was far from emotionally passive.

I began my research on Maynard in 1997 not knowing quite what to expect. I visited the Westfield and Queen Mary Archives (as they were called then) to examine Maynard’s and other primary documents affiliated with Westfield.¹² Maynard’s voluminous archives are rich in description about her upbringing and life experiences as an educational pioneer. Her small leather-bound green book and diary that she wrote faithfully from late adolescence until her death at eighty-six record multi-faceted accounts of her public and private life. Maynard’s diaries, together with her various journals, correspondence, and publications, are summarised in her autobiography for periods of her life for which no diaries exist. Still unfinished when she died, Maynard bequeathed her myriad documents to five close friends, with the request that her life story be completed. Historian Catherine B. Firth published in 1949 the sole biography on Maynard, entitled Constance Louisa Maynard: Mistress of Westfield College that focused on the Christian Maynard’s life as an educational pioneer. Writing during an era silent on sexuality, Firth was so ‘start[led]’ by Maynard’s passionate outpourings that she voided Maynard’s plea, ‘don’t forget the love dear. What I shared with others must not be hidden.’¹³

I found numerous passages in Maynard’s diaries that describe her feelings as an educational pioneer. Such textual evidence proved exhilarating, though I struggled to decipher Maynard’s languages of love. Archivists Anselm Nye and Lorraine Screene suggested other unpublished sources, including Maynard’s sundial diary and personal correspondence, Minutes of Council, and Westfield College Alumnae, Reminiscences and Memorabilia. Subsequent visits were for ‘looking through’ such published works as We Women: a golden hope (1913), and The Life of Dora Greenwell (1926). I also accompanied Janet Sondheimer, author of Castle Adamant (1983), to Hampstead to see the two semi-detached three-storey red brick houses that were the original Westfield until it relocated in 1891 to a stucco mansion to accommodate the increased student body. It was upon entering Maynard’s rooms at the ‘second’ Westfield that I ‘flirted with’ the idea of ‘shar[ing] with others’ Maynard’s ‘truth in love’.¹⁴

I turned first to Maynard’s diary (1871–1935) since it contains straightforward narratives of her social and public life. Most entries are brief and factual about an upper-middle-class woman who travelled extensively with her family to Europe or visited ‘England’s finest’ cathedrals, museums, and ‘splendid’ exhibitions that displayed such innovations as ‘the electrical experimentation with wire’. Maynard was raised by a devout mother of French Huguenot faith who ‘scorned the “frivolous” wrongdoing [dancing and drinking]’ of their society. Her imperialist father also denigrated ‘human depravity’, but workers were particularly ‘wretched and immoral degenerates’. Not surprisingly, her parents’ class, race, and faith-based views shaped Maynard’s sense of religious and social superiority over most Victorians when she became an educational pioneer.¹⁵

The early diary introduces the reader to ‘the Bill’. This was a work timetable that Maynard instituted in 18...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction – Inspired by Constance Maynard: exploring women’s sexual, emotional and religious lives through their writings
• Part 1: Constance Maynard
• Part 2: Love, friendship and desire
• Part 3: Review essay
• Index