Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  When Harriet is in London, she enjoys from time to time the company of Lord Peter Wimsey, who entertains her gallantly in country inns and Soho restaurants. On one occasion, after a journey home spent ‘babbling pleasantly about the Georgian architecture of London’, he tentatively proposes to her as the taxi turns into Mecklenburgh Square from Guilford Street, accepting with grace her customary refusal. Yet Harriet is struck by the realisation that Wimsey is, despite his persistence, commendably sensitive to her resistance: her feelings begin to turn when she realises that he understands instinctively the importance to her of a room of one’s own. He never, she notices, ‘violated the seclusion of Mecklenburgh Square. Two or three times, courtesy had moved her to invite him in; but he had always made some excuse, and she understood that he was determined to leave her that place, at least, free from any awkward associations.’ Resolved to block out all thoughts of softening, she tries to focus on her work: this, she admits to Peter, is ‘the only side of life I haven’t betrayed and made a mess of’. But as the danger at Shrewsbury deepens, Harriet finds herself perplexed by the case, and also struggling, unusually, with the novel she’s writing. She has trapped five suspects in a watermill, all with suitable motives and alibis for a crime, but finds that their attitudes and relationships are beginning to become formulaic, divorced from the messy unpredictability of human problems. It is Peter who encourages her to take the leap Sayers herself made in the writing of this novel: to ‘abandon the jigsaw kind of story and write a book about human beings for a change’. When Harriet admits that she’s afraid of the self-exposure, he replies that only taking risks will produce a book which lives up to her potential. At this point, she realises that unlike Philip Boyes, who found her success unbearable and who (like John Cournos) encouraged her only to take personal risks which were to his benefit, Peter truly cares about her work, and wants her to succeed on her own terms.

  Without spoilers, it’s hard to convey the joy of Gaudy Night – it has one of the most moving and thrilling denouements Sayers ever wrote, featuring chess sets, dog collars and a fateful river picnic – but by the end, a series of dramatic events leave Harriet in no doubt that Peter not only understands how impossible it would be for her to enter a marriage on unequal terms, but also has stylishly worked out exactly how to ensure that Harriet can accept his suit ‘as a free agent’. Towards the end of the novel, Peter and Harriet attend a performance of Bach’s double violin concerto in D minor, where they admire the way the two parallel melodies set each other off beautifully without either subsuming the other. Here, finally, is a model for partnership that will not degrade Harriet or curtail her freedom, but rather provide the conditions under which her writing will flourish. When Peter proposes for the last time, he uses the words of the Oxford graduation ceremony – ‘Placetne, magistra?’ This time the Latin construction expects the answer ‘Yes’.

  *

  Sayers never expected Gaudy Night to achieve commercial success. ‘Whether you advertise it as a love-story, or as educational propaganda, or as a lunatic freak, I leave to you,’ wrote Sayers to her publisher, Victor Gollancz. But despite its length and the fact that, as Sayers freely admitted, it is ‘not really a detective story at all, but a novel with a mild detective interest of an almost entirely psychological kind’, it achieved instant popular and critical acclaim: the Times Literary Supplement admired it as ‘a discussion from every standpoint of the problem of Woman and the Intellectual Life’, and insisted that ‘Gaudy Night stands out even among Miss Sayers’s novels. And Miss Sayers has long stood in a class by herself.’ It remains her most popular book today, widely acclaimed as ‘the first feminist detective novel’. In Gaudy Night’s celebration of education, independence and intellectual freedom, Sayers finally addressed the existential questions that had possessed her since her year in Mecklenburgh Square. In the book, Harriet thinks back to ‘that hot unhappy year when she had tried to believe that there was happiness in surrender … to subdue one’s self to other people’s ends was dust and ashes’. Cournos’s affections and respect were conditional on his principles dominating and obliterating hers: now, like H. D., Sayers had successfully written back to her detractor. Through her writing, Sayers constructed a blueprint for modern relationships which held intellectual and personal integrity at their core.

  Aged forty-three, Sayers was asked by an interviewer whether she would like to be twenty-one again. Her response was a resounding ‘No’. ‘For no bribe,’ she insisted, ‘would we again have endured the fumbling experience, the emotional miseries, the self-conscious humiliations of youth.’ Furthermore, she argued, advice on how to stay young smacks of a ‘period of social history when women were expected to do no thinking, but only feeling’: it would, she suggested, ‘be more sensible to tell them how to grow up’. Her time in Mecklenburgh Square had taught her to grow up: it had also cemented her resolve to live a fulfilling and varied life. ‘One thing I think ought always to be said to young people, and it is this,’ wrote Sayers to a correspondent in 1944. ‘Youth is an unsatisfactory period, full of errors, uncertainties and distress. You will grow out of it. What’s more, you were meant to grow out of it, into something more mature and satisfactory. Don’t let middle-aged people get away with the story that this is the best time of your life and that after it there is nothing to look forward to … Go on doing the thing you think you ought, or want, to be doing at the moment, and at about 40 you may discover that you actually are doing it and settle down to enjoy it.’

  JANE ELLEN HARRISON

  (1850–1928)

  11 Mecklenburgh Street May 1926–April 1928

  I think the Jane–Hope liaison interests

  me most. Win their confidences. I am sure

  they are a fascinating couple.

  DORA CARRINGTON TO LYTTON STRACHEY, 27 AUGUST 1923

  One summer’s day in 1909, a strange entourage arrived in Grantchester, outside Cambridge, and set up camp in a field. The caravan was parked and the carthorse tethered; washing lines were erected and straw laid down for children’s bedding. Augustus John, the charismatic Fitzrovia artist, had come to Newnham College to paint a portrait of Jane Ellen Harrison, the famous classics don. ‘John is encamped with two wives and ten naked children. I saw him in the street today – an extraordinary spectacle for these parts,’ wrote John Maynard Keynes, who was engrossed in work on probability theory at King’s College. ‘All the talk here is about John,’ he told Duncan Grant. ‘According to Rupert [Brooke] he spends most of his time in Cambridge public houses, and has had a drunken brawl in the streets smashing in the face of his opponent.’

  Yet if John caused consternation among most whose paths he crossed that month, he won the affection of his subject. To the art critic D. S. MacColl, who had recommended John for the commission, Harrison described the notorious artist as ‘delightful’: ‘I felt spiritually at home with him from the first moment he came into the room.’ Though they made an unlikely pair, the admiration was mutual: John was kept well entertained by Harrison, a slight woman in her late fifties with wiry grey hair and unusual grey-blue eyes which she attributed to Viking ancestors. He painted her in black lace, reclining on a sofa while chain-smoking cigarettes and chuckling with her close friend and fellow classicist Gilbert Murray. Harrison was delighted with the result. Writing to her friend Ruth Darwin, Harrison concluded that John ‘seems to me to have a real vision of “the beauty of ugliness” … character, I suppose it would ordinarily be called, that comes into all faces however “plain” that belong to people who have lived hard, and that in the nature of things is found in scarcely any young face.’ John later described her as ‘a very charming person tho’ a puzzle to paint’: his portrait is the first of many people’s attempts to solve the enigma of Jane Harrison’s life, or to capture its ambiguities.

  Jane Ellen Harrison by Augustus John, 1909

  Dorothy L. Sayers and H. D. came to Mecklenburgh Square as young women, hoping that long and exciting careers lay ahead of them
. But Jane Harrison arrived there aged seventy-five, having renounced her comfortable life as a Cambridge don and destroyed all traces of her previous existence: she was not beginning her life in the square, but enacting a rebirth no less urgent for coming so late. She died, aged seventy-seven, in her home at 11 Mecklenburgh Street – just off the main square – on 15 April 1928. The guest list for her memorial service, held four days later at St Marylebone Cemetery in Finchley, is testament to the rich variety of Harrison’s friendships, and especially those of her final years: professors of Greek mingled warily with mournful Russian poets; publishers and Bloomsburyites with distant Yorkshire relatives; eminent European philosophers with the doctors and nurses who had tended her devotedly through her long illness. But as an insight into the life being celebrated, the ceremony left guests deflated, feeling as though their friend had become more unknown to them than ever before. Gilbert Murray found the funeral – planned by Hope Mirrlees, who had spent the past decade living with Harrison – ‘odd & disappointing’, and sensed that ‘one somehow felt as if she was deserted’. Leonard and Virginia Woolf arrived late, shuffling into the chapel just as the readings ended. In her diary, Virginia recorded her bemusement at the choices, feeling that the service belied the complexity of Harrison’s own thinking about religion. ‘Who is “God” & what the Grace of Christ? & what did they mean to Jane?’

  Hope Mirrlees spent the remaining months of her tenure in the house they had shared on Mecklenburgh Street attempting to control the way Harrison’s memory would be preserved. Over the next three decades she worked on a biography, which never materialised: whether this was a loyal act of discretion, or a severe case of writer’s block, is impossible to know for sure. ‘The problem of what to say and what to leave out is a very difficult one,’ she wrote apologetically to Jessie Stewart, another former pupil of Harrison’s, who had reproached her for her reticence. ‘Jane was extremely reserved about her own past. She had weathered a great many storms, and I think wanted them to be forgotten – in fact, I feel almost certain that she did. And yet if one omits them, the life loses what she would have called its “pattern”.’ Yet Harrison’s life had no single ‘pattern’: those who knew her in separate periods each remembered, and felt possessive of, a very different character, which they wholeheartedly believed to be the ‘true’ Jane. In March 1950, Gilbert Murray wrote to Stewart about a lecture given by the Russian writer Prince Dmitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky, who had known Harrison well at the end of her life. ‘I thought it very clever but, to speak frankly, I did not really like it. I do not like to have Jane mixed up with Freud and Joyce, nor even with Communism … Of course Mirsky knew a side of her which I perhaps did not but I think he runs his own ideas too hard.’ Murray had been very close to Harrison in the years she spent teaching classics at Newnham between 1898 and 1922. His anxiety to decry Mirsky’s version of Harrison – as a true radical and a distinctly modern thinker – betrays a certain bewilderment at how deliberately her interests and way of life had shifted when she left Cambridge, aged seventy-two, to spend the last six years of her life among a community of Russian political exiles in Paris and Bloomsbury, burning all her papers, including Murray’s letters to her, before she went. ‘I never understood what happened at the end of her life,’ wrote Murray to Stewart. ‘Did Newnham refuse to continue her Fellowship, and was she greatly hurt? Or did she, for other reasons, determine to leave Cambridge and Greek and her old associations? And what part did Hope play in it?’

  *

  Jane Harrison’s brief, charming, artful autobiography represents her own contribution to the myth-making that has always surrounded her. Reminiscences of a Student’s Life was published in 1925 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press; thanks to her significant public stature, it was serialised in the popular weekly the Nation and Athenaeum. ‘I send you a very small book on a still smaller subject,’ she wrote with characteristic self-deprecation to Murray. ‘And so my tale must end.’ But the main narrative of the memoir ends in 1916, nine years before the time of writing: Harrison refuses to reveal anything of times ‘too present, too intimate’, hinting only that recent years have been enlivened by her passion for the Russian language and the companionship of a ‘ghostly daughter, dearer than any child after the flesh’.

  The publication of a memoir often signals that a life is drawing to an end, that the writer is assessing the past with the synthesising gaze of one whose work is done. But Jane Harrison went on living, in strikingly new circumstances. Having defied expectations throughout her career, she refused to settle down to a decorous retirement and stop outraging the establishment with her cheery disregard for traditions and received truths. Though she studied the ancient past, she was always looking to the future. One of the main figures in her research was the ‘eniautos daimon’, or Year Spirit, an ancient deity of seasonal regeneration, whose regular death and rebirth allowed the community to grow and flourish. His ability to shift form and constantly reinvent himself mirrored Harrison’s ever-eager curiosity and her regular interrogation of herself as well as of others, always alert to the possibility of doing things differently. Jane Harrison was so fervently committed to her own freedom that she was willing to make significant changes and sacrifices, even in her seventies, in order to create the best conditions for her work. Her story shows that the question of ‘how to live’ is not restricted to a single answer; when one environment ceased to provide what she needed, Harrison did not hesitate to re-examine her situation.

  Reminiscences of a Student’s Life offers the narrative most often invoked in relation to Jane Harrison: the tale of one Yorkshirewoman’s determination to find an education and fulfil her potential, which made her such an appealing model for Virginia Woolf. Harrison’s mother had died from puerperal fever shortly after Jane’s birth in 1850, and like Mary Shelley, whose mother Mary Wollstonecraft died from the same disease, Jane grew up with a painful sense of responsibility for the breakdown of an idealised family and the unfortunate creation of another. A beloved aunt, who had taken on the children’s upbringing, left the family abruptly for an unexpected marriage, and within six months Jane’s father had proposed to the governess he had employed to replace her. Her brothers (like Woolf’s) were sent to public school, but Jane – whose mackintosh had to be trimmed with fringe, at her stepmother’s insistence, to make it appear feminine – was taught at home along the standard Victorian girls’ curriculum of needlework, deportment, etiquette and committing Bible verses to memory – ‘miscellaneous rubbish’, as Harrison summarised it. One ‘ignorant but willing’ teacher, keen to learn alongside her inquisitive pupil, helped Jane pick up the rudiments of German, Latin, Greek and Hebrew, but this educational experiment was brief: ‘Alas! My kind governess was shortly removed to a lunatic asylum. What share I may have had in her mental downfall I do not care to inquire.’

  Eventually, in ‘dire disgrace’ after a misplaced flirtation with a curate (which began when Jane waylaid him for advice on a mistranslation in the Greek Testament), she was sent to Cheltenham Ladies’ College, a school founded to provide middle-class girls with an education on a par with that of their brothers. Her father and stepmother saw education as a disagreeable but worthwhile investment to fit Jane for the job of staying at home and educating her younger siblings before an expected marriage. But a satisfying piece of good planning enabled Jane to reject their narrow plans for her future and strike out alone. From 1871, when she was twenty-one, she began to receive an annuity of £300 (a very significant sum) from her mother’s will. Her father, who disliked the idea of women earning money, and who was already disgruntled that his father-in-law had arranged for Jane’s mother and aunts to receive their inheritances independently of their husbands, was powerless to stop his daughter’s path to financial freedom. In 1874, having won a scholarship as the best-performing candidate in the University of Cambridge’s General Examination for Women, Harrison arrived at Newnham College to study classics as one of the college’s first tw
enty boarders, with a reputation as ‘the cleverest woman in England’.

  Newnham had opened in 1871, to provide accommodation for women eager to attend Cambridge’s new series of ‘Lectures for Ladies’. Its first principal, Anne Jemima Clough, impressed on potential donors the importance of surroundings conducive to study, arguing – as Woolf would do later – that women can work far more effectively ‘where all the arrangements of the house are made to suit the hours of study, where she can have undisturbed possession of one room, and where she can have access to any books that she may need’. It was a radical notion, but Clough insisted that each of her students be furnished with a private room of their own – all the more essential since women were barred from the university library. Harrison decorated her bedsitter in ‘the newest thing in dolorous Morris papers’ (which George Eliot, on a visit to the college, particularly admired), and relished the unfamiliar freedom of college life. Now she could set her sights on an academic career, developing her interests and ambitions in supportive surroundings.

  Harrison left Newnham in 1879: to her disappointment, her unofficial result placed her only in the second class, and she was not invited to stay on as a tutor. Instead, she made her way to London and looked for work. Though it was back at Newnham that Harrison wrote her most famous books, she did not return to the college until she was forty-eight years old. Those later years, on which her legacy is founded, comprise only a small portion of her life: narratives which focus on her success tend to gloss over the long decades she spent uncertain that her talents would ever achieve recognition. Later, Harrison and Gilbert Murray – lifelong friends, collaborators and lively correspondents – would be considered the two foremost classicists of their era, both public intellectuals commanding respect within and beyond their field. But the contrast in their routes to that position is sobering. After leaving Oxford, Murray – at the age of twenty-three – was appointed Professor of Greek at the University of Glasgow and provided with comfortable accommodation and a generous annual income of £1,300, thanks to his tutor informing the electors that this was the most distinguished undergraduate he had ever encountered. Jane Harrison, in contrast, spent the greater part of her youth and early middle age living cheaply in London boarding houses, experiencing the frustration of being constantly passed over for prestigious posts, while building up her reputation outside academia through the undervalued labour of lecturing in schools, museums and working men’s clubs across Britain.