Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  Freud had told H. D. she was the ‘perfect bisexual’, and during her analysis she wrote to Bryher that she realised she had, apparently unusually, never identified with one parent over the other: ‘I have tried to be man or woman,’ she wrote, ‘but I have to be both.’ In A Room of One’s Own, published five years before H. D.’s analysis, Woolf famously argued, following Coleridge, that ‘a great mind is androgynous … it is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple’. Instead, she calls for women writers to be ‘woman-manly or man-womanly’, and to refuse to limit their scope or ambition in deference to conventional gender roles. H. D. had the book in her library, and it’s tempting to suppose that Woolf’s phrasing may have influenced Julia’s closing words. Speaking of the many dangers women face across their lives – the ‘biological catch’ of accidental pregnancy, boredom as an ‘affable hausfrau’, the invisibility of an ‘old maid’ – Julia suggests that creative work may offer women a chance at ‘true fulfilment’:

  There was one loophole, one might be an artist. Then the danger met the danger, the woman was man-woman, the man was woman-man. But Frederico, for all his acceptance of her verses, had shouted his man-is-man, his woman-is-woman at her; his shrill peacock-cry sounded a love-cry, death-cry for their generation.

  At the end, Julia achieves what H. D. calls ‘gloire’: a modern version of the ancient Greek kleos, the undying glory afforded to those whose achievements live on after death, a concept most commonly associated with war heroes, but also with poets. No longer will Julia allow Rico to play God, as Lawrence did in the game of charades: no longer shall he dictate the parameters within which she may write. ‘Gloire’, for H. D., becomes a fluid creative power, possessed by men and women alike.

  Perhaps you would say I was trespassing, couldn’t see both sides, as you said of my Orpheus. I could be Eurydice in character, you said, but woman-is-woman and I couldn’t be both. The gloire is both.

  No, that spoils it; it is both and neither. It is simply myself sitting here, this time propped up in bed, scribbling in a notebook, with a candle at my elbow.

  H. D. remembered writing the book’s ending in a strange Swiss hotel where ‘the room grew colder as “it” compelled my pencil’. After she added her last corrections and typed out the text afresh, she found herself suddenly contented: reading the pages out loud, she ‘realised that at last, the War I story had “written itself”’. In 1953, she told Aldington that writing Bid Me to Live had played an essential role in helping her feel free at last. ‘You must not think I minimise your output and your years of hard work. I just had to do my own work and was from the first, even with Ezra, in danger of being negated by other people’s work. I speak of this in regard to DHL in the book.’ In her seventies, H. D. looked back on Lawrence’s injunction, carelessly thrown out in Mecklenburgh Square while he was criticising her poetry, to ‘kick over your tiresome house of life’. She reflected on her long and satisfying career, her happy relationships and many friends, her four grandchildren and the success of her final novel. ‘This is my House of Life,’ she wrote, ‘but it is not tiresome.’

  DOROTHY L. SAYERS

  (1893–1957)

  44 Mecklenburgh Square

  December 1920 –December 1921

  I should try the garden in Mecklenburgh

  Square. A thing might lie quite a long

  time under those bushes.

  DOROTHY L. SAYERS, Strong Poison (1930)

  On 14 October 1920, the autumn sun pouring through the windows, the University of Oxford’s first women graduates were presented in the Sheldonian Theatre. As the south doors swung open to reveal the principals of the women’s colleges, resplendent in caps and gowns after decades of campaigning for the honour of degrees, the theatre – containing the largest-ever assembly congregated at the university – rang out in spontaneous applause. Among the celebrants that day was twenty-seven-year-old Dorothy Leigh Sayers, receiving a first-class degree in modern languages from Somerville College five years after she had completed her studies. She had written to the university especially to request a place in this ceremony, ostensibly because she was on the brink of leaving the country – ‘but really, of course,’ she wrote to her mother in August, ‘because I want so much to be in the first batch. It will be so much more amusing.’ That evening the Somerville graduates – including the writers Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby – celebrated with a jubilant dinner, where a special toast was drunk to Emily Penrose, principal of the college, and where Professor Gilbert Murray presided as guest of honour. ‘I gnash my teeth when I think of all yr Somerville young women preening in cap & gown,’ wrote Murray’s friend Jane Harrison from Cambridge, where proposals to admit women to full membership of the university – for which she had been petitioning since 1895 – were rejected that December for the second time. ‘So like Oxford & so low to start after us & get in first!’

  The first women graduates, October 1920

  *

  ‘Of those Somerville students in the years immediately preceding the First War,’ wrote Vera Brittain, ‘Dorothy L. Sayers made the most lasting impression both on her contemporaries and on the outside world.’ Brittain was writing in 1960, when Sayers was firmly established as a doyenne of detective fiction, whose flamboyantly monocled detective Lord Peter Wimsey was a household name, as widely beloved as Hercule Poirot, Father Brown or Sherlock Holmes. But in 1920, with few concrete plans beyond a staunch refusal to settle as a teacher and a yearning to achieve success through her writing, Sayers’s future prospects were beginning to cause consternation to her long-suffering parents, and – though she did her best to hide it – to herself. It’s easy to read the year Sayers spent in Mecklenburgh Square, writing her first novel, as her apprenticeship, the starting point in her inevitable rise to fame and commercial vindication. Yet at this point, success was far from assured for Sayers. Like H. D., she faced scorn from male contemporaries who dismissed her work just as she was finding her voice, while her sense of independence was shaken by an unsatisfying relationship which forced her to examine whether any form of partnership was compatible with her commitment to her work. This was the year in which Sayers’s life could have taken any of various directions: she might have agreed to marry an unsuitable man for the sake of security, or accepted the entreaties of her parents to take a respectable permanent teaching job and keep her writing as a pleasant hobby. It was due to her own imagination and determination that her life would follow a very different path.

  Dorothy L. Sayers was born in 1893 in Oxford, where her father was headmaster of the Christ Church Cathedral School. She grew up – an only child – in Bluntisham, a small farming village in Cambridgeshire, where Reverend Sayers had been appointed rector. Religion was a constant presence in her childhood, but not the mysterious spirituality of H. D.’s Moravian heritage; she later described her first years as ‘hedged about … with moral restrictions’, and remembered an early sense of frustration that religious life at the rectory was not conducted with the critical rigour to which other aspects of thought and study were subjected. Nonetheless, Dorothy’s intellectual development was a priority for the whole household. Her father started her on Latin at the age of six, and across her teens encouraged her many literary projects, which included a dramatic version of Little Women, a narrative poem concerning a suicidal prisoner of war, and a self-conscious piece entitled Such is Fame about a ‘very young authoress’ who finds trouble when her aunts realise they have been pilloried in her latest bestseller. Among her most extended pieces was a work in cantos called The Comediad, in which the spirited heroine breaks off her engagement to a stolid gentleman whose wits have disappointed her. ‘Dear me!’ wrote the teenage Sayers, expressing an attitude that she would hold on to throughout her twenties: ‘At nineteen, a woman expects to enjoy life, and not to be tied to a “good husband”!’

  Reflecting two decades later on the start of her writing career, Sayers contrasted her prospects with those of her aunts, ‘brought up without e
ducation or training, thrown, at my grandfather’s death, into a world that had no use for them’. One became a nun, another a ‘“companion” to various old cats, saving halfpence and cadging trifles, aimlessly doing what when done was of little value to God or man’. Sayers’s own mother was a keen letter-writer, who taught her daughter to read before she was four; much later, Sayers described her as ‘a woman of exceptional intellect, which, unfortunately, never got the education which it deserved’. It was thanks to her parents that Sayers’s did. Though not especially well off, Henry and Helen Sayers were fascinated and delighted by their daughter’s precocious talents, and made sure that her curiosity and interests were nurtured; their attitude would prove instrumental in giving her the time and confidence to develop as a scholar over the coming years. H. D.’s astronomer father had tutored her in maths and science, his own passions, but forbade art school; Virginia Woolf had been encouraged to read widely by a father who nonetheless didn’t consider that he had any duty to train his daughter for a profession. But Sayers, after years of rigorous home-schooling, was sent in 1909 to board at the Godolphin School in Salisbury. In 1912 she entered Oxford’s Somerville College on a Gilchrist Scholarship, having topped the whole country in the Cambridge Higher Local Examination – a nationwide school-leaving test – the previous spring.

  Having up to now taken her education for granted, Sayers arrived at the ancient university at a time when the position of women there was the subject of fierce debate. Over the latter half of the nineteenth century, campaigners had pressed for universities to allow girls to continue their education beyond school on equal terms with men. This upheaval of the status quo stirred virulent opposition among commentators: some medical detractors argued that education would disrupt menstruation and cause dysfunction of the reproductive system; others feared that educated women would be introduced to sexual licentiousness through classical literature, that spinster teachers might peddle ‘oblique and distorted conceptions of love’, or that women’s widespread employment might presage an apocalyptic war between the sexes, culminating in the ultimate extinction of the race. In 1873, two Oxford colleges offered a scholarship to the school student who obtained the highest results in the ‘Cambridge Locals’, only to withdraw the prize in embarrassment when that pupil’s name was revealed to be Annie Rogers. Rogers (who was awarded a set of books as a consolation prize) became the symbol of women’s fight for education, specifically in Oxford, where that year a series of ‘Lectures for Ladies’ was established in borrowed buildings and attended by the daughters, sisters and wives of sympathetic dons. In 1879, Somerville opened as a residential hall for women, where twelve pupils lived and devoted their time to study.

  In subsequent years, Somerville became the first of the women’s halls to adopt an entrance examination and call itself a college, as well as the first Oxford college to be non-denominational. This secular stance attracted Sayers, by now fed up with the ‘sentimental’ and overly dutiful Christianity practised at home and school. When she arrived at Somerville, the college was tentatively established within the university: women were allowed to sit all classes and examinations, though were not considered ‘full’ students, nor was their work acknowledged with the award of a degree at the end. But women’s increasing freedom was marked by several new buildings, as the university began to carve out new spaces to accommodate its female students. Somervillians no longer had to share the single bathroom, which had once doubled up as a servant’s bedroom; the college now boasted a magnificent library, and a grand dining hall was under construction in a new quadrangle appended to the original house. The renovations were designed to make it feel less like a family home – which the original arrangement had tried to emulate – and more like a real college, a place where students could focus on their professional work. Nonetheless, Sayers’s contemporaries remembered tepid water, unpleasant food and a general atmosphere of restriction, since their academic and social behaviour was under constant scrutiny from opponents eager to cite the slightest misdemeanour as ammunition to demand a revocation of women’s place at Oxford. A female student recalled a don who began his classes ‘Gentlemen – and others who attend my lectures’, and another who insisted that the women sit behind him so he didn’t have to see them as he declaimed. Articles in the press constantly feigned concern that women were overworking, and that their minds and constitutions were not geared to such intensive toil.

  But this didn’t prevent Sayers from having fun. She threw on the fire a letter from an elderly cousin attempting to recruit her for the Christian Social Union, and flung herself into artistic activity: she sang in the Bach Choir (and was reprimanded by the college dean for rehearsing in the bath), attended lectures by G. K. Chesterton (after whom she named the overstuffed armchair in her bedroom) and frequented Gilbert and Sullivan operas and university debates (including one in which her friend Charis Barnett – later a pioneer of birth control – proposed the motion ‘That the reluctance of the modern woman to marry is a benefit to Society’). While the dons fretted that girls in tight skirts were distracting male examiners, and urged their charges to maintain decorum in public, Sayers and her peers enjoyed giving chaperones the slip to meet male friends in Oxford’s tea rooms, hosting late-night cocoa parties amid swirls of cigarette smoke, and testing the limits of their seniors’ outrage. Sayers was well known to her friends for her penchant for ‘extravagant indoor headgear’ and her long earrings featuring a parrot perched in a gilded cage. Later in life, Sayers would ride a motorbike and dress in masculine attire (‘If the trousers do not attract you,’ she insisted in an essay, ‘so much the worse; for the moment I do not want to attract you. I want to enjoy myself as a human being.’). Even at this age, when others at Somerville were more interested in meeting husbands than in scholarship, she was eager to rebel against the norms of femininity, aware that conformity might curtail her creative ambition.

  Dorothy L. Sayers as Sir Hugh Allen in the Going-Down Play of 1915

  At Somerville, Sayers found new audiences for her writing, previously restricted to indulgent aunts and reluctant schoolfriends. With Barnett and several others, including Muriel Jaeger, Muriel St Clare Byrne and Dorothy Rowe, she founded the Mutual Admiration Society for the open critique of members’ literary efforts. (If the group didn’t take the name themselves, she noted sardonically, others would surely bestow it on them.) The unwavering support of this group of women was a spur to Sayers’s self-belief as a developing writer, and provided her first taste of a literary circle, each participant committed to improving their own and each other’s work. Several members went on to publish novels, plays and poems, and remained friends and regular collaborators; throughout her life, Sayers would share works in progress with her old group, who wrote back with rigorous analysis as well as generous praise. Twenty-five years later, Sayers knew some of the Inklings, a far more famous Oxford writing group. But while these men – C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, J. R. R. Tolkien – were established writers in and outside the university, the MAS offered a subversive community within an institution where women were constantly reminded that their talents were not wholly welcome.

  Sayers’s offerings to their weekly meetings were mainly in verse, which, she later wrote, she considered ‘the best medium in which to form one’s style’: ‘I write prose uncommonly badly, and can’t get ideas,’ she told a friend. Yet although her poetry mainly employed conventional forms and a serious, austere tone, at college she participated with gusto in ribald storytelling sessions and ongoing battles of wit. At one point, she wrote home that Somerville was in the grip of ‘quite a ghost craze’, with everyone telling ‘psychic stories’: her own contribution to this trend involved a dead millionaire giving an account of his life to the Devil to establish how many years his soul should spend in purgatory. But at the end of her second year, the outbreak of war rendered fictional horrors obsolete.

  Sayers spent the beginning of the First World War on holiday in France, having blithely d
isregarded her family’s concerns; with no close friends in immediate danger, and removed from the despair of those like H. D. left behind on the home front, she found the situation ‘immensely exciting’. The following summer, living at Oriel College since Somerville had been transformed into a military hospital, she completed her degree, specialising in medieval French, and began to contemplate her future. She toyed with the idea of staying on at Somerville, but soon changed her mind: ‘Do you know,’ she wrote to her parents, ‘it is dreadful, but the longer I stay in Oxford, the more certain I am that I was never cut out for an academic career – I was really meant to be sociable.’ Many Somerville students took on war work, for the British Red Cross or St John Ambulance Brigade, serving as radiographers in military hospitals, as chemists and War Office administrators, or, like Vera Brittain, as nurses in France. Sayers considered similar pathways, keen to do ‘something real for the first time in my life’, but decided against it, wary of ‘hard labour and horrors’, and in January 1916 she accepted a position as modern languages mistress at a girls’ school in Hull, deciding it ‘wouldn’t do any harm’ to try teaching for a year.