by Seth Koven
fancy asking that question they
all ask me that, you are well
asked for round Bromley I think
they really do love you for yourself
so make haste home & don’t
stay there169
Nellie’s retelling of this story is playful and coy, as if “all” their neighbors are acknowledging something about the women’s relationship in a way that neither of them could. She implies that Mrs. Starling’s question is an odd impertinence—“fancy asking that question”—but then immediately makes it normal by noting, “they all ask me that.” Rather than declaring her own love, Nellie deflects attention away from the subject of gossip, their relationship, to the much safer topic of their neighbors’ esteem for Muriel: “they really do love you for yourself.”
Nellie began each of her letters to Muriel with the same formal opening: “Dear Miss Lester.” She adhered to the well-established naming conventions of her time. The older sibling, Muriel, was always “Miss Lester” and her younger sister was always “Miss Doris.” (Muriel’s older sister, Kathleen was married so Nellie called her “Mrs. Hogg.”) At first glance, such formality seems to betoken only class difference and emotional distance hard to square with Nellie’s full-bodied passionate closings: “Your Nellikens” and “Your loving Mate Nell xxx accept these.” How could they have remained on such seemingly formal terms and yet also have been loving partners? Are there other possible interpretations of “Dear Miss Lester”?
When Nellie addressed Muriel as “Dear Miss Lester” she underscored something they knew and cherished: they had found a way to love one another across a vast social and class divide. Difference produced desire even as Nellie and Muriel desired difference.170 Nellie frequently repeated “Dear Miss Lester” in the middle of her letters, sometimes when she resumed writing after a break. Each repeated direct address invited Muriel to conjure Nellie physically before her. Each reminded Nellie about what she found so achingly attractive about Muriel: her difference. Iteration intensifies intimacy by eroticizing difference.
Formal salutations were compatible with the most sensual sexual relationships between women. The devoutly pious Anglican Constance Maynard (1849–1935) and her agnostic lover Louisa Lumsden (1840–1935) founded Muriel’s public school, St. Leonard’s in Scotland.171 Maynard’s stunningly frank diaries and manuscript autobiographies record her struggle to reconcile her fleshly delight in other women (“the abandonment of enthusiastic love”) with her exalted spiritual and pedagogical vocation.172 In the midst of a particularly stormy exchange with her bedmate in 1877, she confided, “for all my griefs I could not keep my hands off Miss Lumsden, and begged her to come home with me.”173 In the privacy of her diary, Louisa remains “Miss Lumsden” even as Constance has her hands all over her—a reminder to Maynard that Miss Lumsden was her senior as well as her Head Mistress at St. Leonard’s.
The point is not that Nellie and Muriel enjoyed the physical “abandonment of enthusiastic love” like Maynard and Lumsden. I think they did not. Rather, I have suggested that “Dear Miss Lester” conveyed a wide range of meanings, at once conventionally formal and heterodoxically intimate. There is little to be gained in pinning down Nellie and Muriel’s loving friendship with a name. Vera Brittain had come to a similar conclusion in 1963 as she finished writing her history of the “rebel passion” animating Muriel Lester and her fellow Christian revolutionaries. Brittain had tried “to define the difference between Agape, Eros, and Philo,” but found she could not do it. “It is really too subtle for English to explain,” she confessed, “except through poetry.”174 Nellie’s letters to Muriel incite and frustrate the impulse to define the nature of their love. Muriel and Nellie transacted their transformative love and revolutionary Christianity in the literal, affective, imaginative, and intellectual space between “Dear Miss Lester” and “Your loving Mate Nell xxx accept these.”
CONCLUSIONS: DIALECTS FOR THE HEART
Few rivaled the author of Aurora Leigh in her mastery of the languages of love. By turns plaintive and disarming, Elizabeth Barrett spoke “comfortable details” to restore friendship’s frayed ties in a letter to a girlhood friend. There were, she averred, as many “different dialects for the heart” as there were “tongues.” Far from conjuring the Babel of mutual incomprehension, the poet invited her friend to contemplate the plenitude and variety of “tongues” that speak from and to the heart, while offering her letter as one exquisite example.175 In her letters to Muriel, Nellie invented her own “dialect for the heart.”
Nellie’s heart dialect mobilized a grammar of difference through tropes about caring for the sick body, hers and Muriel’s. Her epistolary erotics enact double gestures of reciprocity and inequality, sameness and difference, knowing and not knowing, having and wanting. These unresolved tensions fill the pages of her letters and allow us to glimpse how she used language to express her own embodied subjectivity. Canny rhetorical performances intended to produce quite specific effects on Muriel, her letters are a remarkable archive of affect. They retain a sense of freshness and spontaneity a century after she penned them. This too is an effect of her use of language—as palpable, playful, and, in its own way as skillful as Gertrude Stein’s wartime experiments.
Against the reductive bureaucratic logic of London Hospital that first defined Nellie as a disease-bearing body and then handed her over to be reclassified as a pauper lunatic, she used her letters to Muriel to express wit, hurt, delight, and tenderness. They convey ephemeral information about their shared interests, remind Muriel how much Nellie longed for her, and prod Muriel to write back to her. Like Claude in Arthur Hugh Clough’s epistolary verse novel about not “exactly” being in love, Amours de Voyage (1849), Nellie wrote to her beloved so that “you may write me an answer.”176 Nellie, like Muriel, understood the affectionately coercive powers and implicit obligations of friendship and letter writing. Her letters to Muriel were one way she reclaimed her personhood in the aftermath of her soul-shattering horror of being a “pauper lunatic.” They were as much a technology of interiority as London Hospital’s twice daily thermometer measurements and Rontgen rays. Using her letters, she reassembled a self in relation to Muriel as well as to the world they inhabited and the one they sought to make.177
Muriel’s breakdown in 1916–17 and her health struggles during the preceding six years made her distrust allopathic medicine. During her long period of doctor-mandated “rest” in Loughton in 1916–17, she grew weary of her own “morbid” absorption in monitoring her body, in listening to the rush of blood and the beating of her heart. She came to recognize her illness as a problem of her inner moral and spiritual life. Her Prayer of Relaxation was her solution. It offered an alternative path inward whose destination was self-knowledge achieved through joyous union with a loving God. The Prayer was simple, but its genealogical antecedents spanned centuries, religious traditions, and continents. It was an eclectic global spiritual formation that performed its healing work within that most intimate of locales, Muriel’s innermost being.
Muriel’s spiritual therapeutics were just as modern as Freudian psychoanalytic approaches to mental health, but vastly more portable, democratic, and economical. They required no professional “expertise” in the human sciences, with their investment in extending their authority into the most private recesses of humanity.178 In place of Freud’s model of the self as modernity’s secreted battleground of competing forces of ego, id, and superego, Muriel offered the prospect of inward stillness and harmony. Her psycho-spiritual techniques participated in and contributed to the proliferation of vernacular psychologies in the early twentieth century that bridged religion and science, Eastern and Western understandings of body and soul.179
Prayer worked for Muriel. For the next five decades after the resolution of her crisis of 1916–17, it sustained her exceptionally robust life as she crisscrossed the globe as an ambassador of peace and reconciliation. Muriel was one of those people who seemed perpetuall
y spry and youthful. Regally erect in her bearing, she exuded that peculiar mix of vigor and serenity, confidence and humility that we associate with saintliness. It drew many to her; it repelled some. She had not always possessed this embodied persona, I have argued. It was the result of deliberate spiritual labor in the aftermath of her 1916–17 breakdown. Prayer did not, could not, “cure” Nellie’s mitral valve degeneration; nor could it compensate for nutritional deficiencies in her diet caused by poverty that made her so susceptible to recurrent illness. While Muriel’s sphere of activity expanded, Nellie’s physical world grew ever more circumscribed. At forty, she had an old woman’s body even though her intellect, wit, and spirit remained fully intact.
Despite Muriel’s devotion to exploring her inner life, she paradoxically has left behind very little of it. The titles of Muriel’s two major autobiographies, It Occurred To Me and It So Happened suggest that she casually offered readers ideas just as they “occurred” or “happened” to her—something more than afterthoughts but much less than programmatic Confessions in the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau. The surviving drafts of these books show this was not true. They were carefully crafted texts, much like the archival remains of Muriel’s interiority. Despite the relative paucity of archival sources by and about Nellie, we know more about her physical and psychological insides than Muriel’s.
Muriel’s decision to preserve Nellie’s letters indicates just how precious they were to her. Nellie’s letters mattered. They documented the remarkable success of their utopian project to use Christian love to break down the barriers separating half-orphaned Cockney match factory workers like Nellie and wealthy educated daughters of the urban bourgeoisie like Muriel. Nellie’s letters also disclose the limits of their love and the ways in which Nellie and Muriel, in quite different ways, powerfully resisted their own project. For all their determination to transcend hierarchies and efface boundaries of difference, Nellie and Muriel kept finding ways to reproduce them. Nellie pushed back against Muriel’s egalitarian project by loving Muriel partly because Muriel was her social better. Nellie delighted in reminding Muriel to love her because she was not her equal. Muriel invited Nellie to enter into sacred intimacy while fleeing from its implications. Muriel found it easier to love ever-widening communities of people in need—in Bow, East London and the world—than to love any one person. The letters show Muriel and Nellie constructing boundaries even as they sought to obliterate them, unmaking and remaking their worlds.
CHAPTER FIVE
Love and Christian Revolution
“Loving means making experiments all the time.”
—Henry Hodgkin, Lay Religion (1918)
ON FEBRUARY 13, 1915, East Londoners greeted the latest of a long line of institutions founded for their betterment, Kingsley Hall. This was an unpromising time for Muriel and Doris Lester to launch a scheme along pacifist, feminist, and socialist principles of social sharing. Turkey had just initiated the mass deportation of Armenians while German U-boats began to trawl the waters surrounding Britain. War, H. G. Wells assured Britons, not God’s love, was the only way to end all war.1 In the eyes of many of their “Hun”-hating neighbors, the sisters and their friends had set themselves apart from the community to which they claimed to belong. They cared far too much for the civil rights of German “enemy aliens” and too little for the state’s insatiable appetite for men to fill the ranks of Britain’s all-volunteer army and navy. Nor was it clear precisely what kind of institution it was. Muriel cultivated this ambiguity. Eighteen years after its founding, she published a pamphlet, “What IS Kingsley Hall?” celebrating its definitional uncertainty as an institution while proclaiming its unequivocal principles. (See fig. 5.1.) “A Settlement? An East End University? A Church? OR WHAT?” None seemed to fit. “It is a difficult place to stick a label on, because its members ignore barriers of race, creed, nation and class.” She offered “People’s House” as the best, albeit provisional, name for it.2
About Nellie’s centrality to creating and sustaining this “people’s house,” Muriel had no doubts. “Never has there been a better friend to Kingsley Hall than Nellie,” she readily acknowledged in the Hall’s report for 1923. Nellie, who always had so little, had given more than anyone. Her intellectual, spiritual and affective labor had been vital to the Hall’s founding and development.
5.1. What IS Kingsley Hall? (London, 1933), Lester/7/2/12, Lester Papers. (Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute.)
She cherished [the idea of the Hall], helped it to grow, made it seem real. Whenever the dream began to grow hazy she would discuss it in terms of flesh and blood and by fitting actual people into its imagined framework, she increased one’s faith. After its birth, it was Nell one turned to in every crisis.3
What Muriel never quite said was that for her Kingsley Hall was the bricks-and-mortar incarnation of their loving friendship. It was also the instrument that she, Doris, Nellie, and their neighbors used to enact their vision of a Christian revolution in everyday life.
Muriel’s close colleague Henry Hodgkin, the Quaker Christian revolutionary founder of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FoR), believed that “loving” meant “making experiments all the time.”4 This was certainly true for Nellie and Muriel. Their love was incubator and testing ground of their Christian revolutionary social politics. Their “aim” was no less than to set up the Kingdom of Heaven in Bow.5 Hubris uneasily rubbed up against humility in their self-effacing project to use the power of love—God’s and their own—to remake themselves and the world.
Bringing God’s revolutionary message of love to the world required prayer, which in turn demanded unwavering discipline of mind, body, and spirit. Individual meditative prayer was far too important for Muriel’s very survival to leave to happenstance. She reserved space for it in Kingsley Hall and set aside particular times each day for it. She likewise expected and demanded members of Kingsley Hall’s community—at the Hall itself, at 58–60 Bruce Road, and later at Children’s House (founded in 1923)—to weave prayer into the warp and woof of their daily lives.
The path to freedom in Bow, England and the world was no less dependent on order and discipline. During Kingsley Hall’s eventful first decade, Muriel elaborated exceptionally detailed rules of daily life for community members, which proscribed what she called “anti-social” behaviors incompatible with God’s earthly Kingdom. It was anti-social and “may even smack of egotism” to leave the dregs of toothpaste in the washbasin; it was anti-social to clear away tea things and “leave sticky sediment un-noticed on the table;” it was “positively dangerous to other people’s health” to leave the sugar jar uncovered. Muriel echoed wartime restrictions on gossip imposed by the Defense of the Realm Act (DORA, 1914) in the name of national security when she dictated a precise script for community members to use when confronted by comments and complaints about an absent third person: “I can’t listen unless so-and-so is here.”6 She likened the dangers of such talk to “secret diplomacy,” a term widely used by contemporaries to account for the insidious origins of World War I.7
Order and discipline were Muriel’s antidotes to the flabby excesses and illusory freedoms of early twentieth-century bourgeois liberal individualism.8 Strict daily routines at peace-loving Kingsley Hall paradoxically mirrored the militarization of civilian life and soldiers’ regimented disciplines. Perhaps this should not be surprising: the militant Christian has often been figured as a zealous foot soldier in God’s army.9
In modern British history, Christianity and revolution have frequently seemed fundamentally incompatible at least since the French Jewish historian Élie Halévy argued (as early as 1906) that Methodism saved Britain from the violent social and political upheavals that bedeviled its cross-Channel rival.10 In the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx’s invectives against religion as an opiate of the masses solidified the identification of the revolutionary Left with irreligion set in motion by the Jacobins.11 To be sure, the link between citizenship and membership in the es
tablished Church of England generated political dissent and constitutional change during Catholic and Nonconformist campaigns of the 1820s and ’30s to remove their legal disabilities. The phalanx of “church and state” also encouraged the growth of exuberant oppositional variants of Nonconformity upon which, I have argued, Muriel drew in forging her “God is Love” theology.
The roots of British Labour and socialism in religious Nonconformity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century have long been acknowledged, but usually to explain their reformist and evolutionary bent. By this reckoning, religion contains and diverts revolutionary impulses even when it is allied to progressive social and political programs.12 This was not so for Muriel and Nellie. Their faith animated and demanded a revolution in moral values and socioeconomic structures.
Kingsley Hall’s pacifist principles only further compound the case against its claim to be genuinely revolutionary. As Liberal protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out to Muriel Lester when they shared a platform in 1934, pacifism was a weapon only the privileged could afford.13 It domesticated and defanged popular revolution by taking away the most effective weapon of the dispossessed: their potential to enact violence in pursuit of justice and equality.14 In the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), some found it difficult to take seriously Kingsley Hall’s brand of revolution. Were the rich simply going to hand over their wealth to the poor because their consciences told them to “follow” Jesus?15 For Muriel, the answer was “yes.” To revolutionize her own life, she undertook ever more daring “experiments in personal economics” culminating in her much-publicized transfer of her inheritance to a restitution fund controlled by and for the people of Bow in 1927.16