The outcome was that by 1914 Rebecca West was pregnant with Wells’s child. Jane was told straightaway. She had already known about the existence of another illegitimate child by Amber Reeves (also a writer). Amber was born in New Zealand but went to England with her parents to finish school and attend university. She and her parents were members of the Fabian Society. After Amber had given a student paper at the Philosophical Society, where she met Wells, it is said the couple went to Paris for a weekend alone. It soon became public knowledge that Amber and Wells were lovers. Wells was all for hiding the relationship but Amber couldn’t understand why. It wasn’t difficult for the people around them to discover the affair. One friend of the Wellses stated that the scandal was in the fact that the affair wasn’t kept hidden.
Rebecca West
In 1909 Amber Reeves was pregnant. She and Wells removed to France to get away from all the gossip. The two of them were hopeless at living together, neither wanted the responsibility of housework or cooking. This may well explain part of the reason that Wells was so grateful to his wife Jane, as she buffered him from mundane reality. Amber couldn’t cope at all and was packed off back to England by Wells while he remained overseas to write. When he too returned home, he and Jane took Amber into their house to live with them.
Before Wells’s baby was born in December 1909 Amber married a lawyer, George Rivers Blanco White. In her own writing she says that it was not a marriage of her choice but one made between White and Wells. She concedes it was one of the best things to have ever happened to her. The daughter, Anna-Jane, born on the last day of the year, was under the impression her father was White; when she turned 18 she was told the truth.
Six years later Wells’s latest mistress, Rebecca West, was about to give birth in a rather unattractive semi-detached house in an out of the way place: Hunstanton in Norfolk. She and Wells began an elaborate charade of being husband and wife. Wells became Mr West, a movie director, although sometimes he said he was a journalist. The child, Anthony, was brought up to call his father ‘Wellsie’ and his mother ‘Auntie Panther’. This was something that Anthony, as an adult, found very hard to forgive his mother for.
Wells and West kept their relationship going all through the war years. Jane and Rebecca were expected to be courteous to each other. Jane had grown used to this and saw it as an aspect of her wifely duties to her genius husband. Rebecca also played her part towards Jane with politeness. However, scratch the surface of these two women and what they really felt for each other was quite a different matter. Jane would go through all the letters Wells received, whether they were business or private – this was also part of her duty. With the love letters Jane would annotate them at their points of hypocrisy in regards to herself. Rebecca in turn would privately comment that Jane was a dominating witch. Wells, whatever his extraordinary charm was that made these otherwise independent and intelligent women fall over themselves for him, was unconcerned at the reality behind the façade; as long as he was happy then that was all that mattered. Apparently, when he took Rebecca and baby Anthony for a ride in his car, he later complained to Rebecca that all the attention focused on the baby and that it really made him question his love for her.
Jane, on the other hand, was his ideal: organised, domesticated and totally devoted to making his life comfortable. Why did someone like Rebecca West want the company of such a man? Love is blind the old maxim goes and perhaps it is true. The relationship between the writers was already beginning to show signs of strain. Rebecca had to resort to journalism to help pay the bills, while she longed to have the leisure to write what she considered serious work. Wells would have kept her financially, although maybe not in luxury, but Rebecca was adamant to stay independent. Anthony was a nuisance to her writing and at the age of 4, or even before that, he was sent to a Montessori boarding school. Anthony later wrote very bitterly about his childhood experiences and could not see how getting rid of him so early meant that she had ever loved him.
Rebecca began to tire of having to share her lover with his wife and the other demands on his time. On his side, Wells got insanely jealous at any suggestion that Rebecca might be seeing another man. Rebecca would quarrel with her domestic employees and this made the household constantly unsettled. Wells was so used to the domestic quiet and smooth running of the house he shared with Jane that he kept bringing up the comparison in front of Rebecca. At one point he had Jane send Rebecca a housekeeper, but the woman was so awful that Rebecca told her to leave. Anthony, sticking up for his mother instead of maligning her, suggests that the offer of help from Jane to Rebecca was in fact a veiled insult.
In 1922 Rebecca and Wells met in Gibraltar to begin a holiday in Spain. The reunion was highly anticipated by Rebecca at least and she wrote of how she couldn’t wait to see him. The holiday was a disaster. Wells was ill, or thought he was. His complaints and irritability with everything around him, including his nursemaid, infuriated Rebecca. When she herself had been ill in the past Wells had never had any sympathy or patience with her. Then, to Rebecca’s absolute horror and disgust, Wells ordered her to get his coat from their room before they went out for a walk. It was not a request but a command and it was made in a hotel foyer full of people. Rebecca made an equally public negation to his demand.
What both of them wanted was a caring wife-like figure. Wells already had this in Jane; unfortunately he also wanted sexual excitement and constant stimulation from other sources. Rebecca probably wanted someone to coset her and adore her while letting her follow her career. In other words, the two writers were very similar and therefore totally wrong for each other in any kind of domestic relationship.
Apparently Rebecca, after her mother’s death in 1921, began referring to Wells as her husband when she wrote to him. Over the next seven or eight years the relationship between Wells and West was as tempestuous as ever. They would fight and make up repeatedly. When Jane died of cancer in 1927 Rebecca was worried that she would have to become a Jane substitute and be stifled under the domesticity of looking after a literary genius instead of being one.
Finally the affair ended when Rebecca married Henry Andrews, a respectable banker. This man was to provide the stability and care that she craved for herself. She may have desired the excitement of Wells but when it came to reality, Rebecca West needed financial and emotional support. She settled into middle-class respectability very well and at times bemoaned the fact that she had wasted so much time and energy on loving Wells. The two remained friends until Wells’s death in 1946. Even though Rebecca West had been happily married for nearly twenty years by the time Wells died, she mourned his loss deeply.
THE WOMEN OF
RADCLYFFE HALL
Radclyffe Hall
Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall was born on 12 August 1880 of very wealthy, landowning stock. In 1907 she met the woman who would be her first great passion, Mabel Batten, twenty-three years her senior and already a grandmother. Mabel was a very gifted amateur singer and was herself married to an older man. Mabel had had affairs on and off throughout her marriage and if her husband minded he never let it show.
Marguerite, who took the name Radclyffe as a first name, began a steamy affair with Mabel. Again, Mabel’s husband seemed perfectly happy for his wife to amuse herself in this way. On his death Mabel and Radclyffe set up house together. Mabel decided to call her lover John and that was the name that stuck ever afterwards.
Before life with Mabel, John had harboured ambitions to be a writer but had never committed to actually doing it. Under Mabel’s influence and direction, she began to write seriously. It was Mabel who introduced her partner to William Heinemann of the publishing house and on his advice John began writing her first novel. Mabel was always the womanly half of the couple while John had always enjoyed dressing up like a boy and was happy to continue that way. Mabel tended to mother John; after all, she had years of experience and John’s own mother had never been very interested in her daughter.
In 1915
an afternoon tea party was held by Lady Clarendon. John and Mabel were invited as was a much younger cousin of Mabel’s. Her name at birth was Margot Elena Gertrude Taylor, although she preferred Una. Her married name was Troubridge and her title was Lady. Una had a young daughter, Andrea. Admiral Troubridge had three children from his first marriage, had obviously been a bit of a womaniser and gave Una syphilis; it was not a happy union.
At the time of that fateful tea party Mabel and John had been together for eight years. John was prone to falling in love on the spot and had a few flings here and there, but mostly she was dedicated to a life with Mabel, whom she would never leave. Una was introduced to John and it was love at first sight. Mabel was content to let the passion run its usual course and abate. However, this time it didn’t. John and Una saw more and more of each other, sometimes in Mabel’s company but more often than not alone.
By the end of the year the three were on holiday together in Cornwall. Two’s company but three’s a crowd proved true in this case. Mabel complained of tiredness and stayed most of the time in her room reading while the two younger women rambled about by themselves. For Mabel, the holiday was a disaster and she told John that although she didn’t mind her having a younger lover, she did not like being part of a threesome. John was free to see Una but not in Mabel’s company and not all the time. John retorted that Mabel was being overly possessive and jealous, reminding Mabel that she didn’t own her.
Mabel Batten
After a particularly bad quarrel over dinner one night Mabel took a funny turn. At first John thought it was a dramatic tantrum but it soon became apparent that something serious was wrong. Mabel felt terribly cold, had pins and needles in her legs and was getting sharp pains through her chest. She collapsed and was carted off to hospital. Mabel Batten had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage. She slipped in and out of consciousness over the next ten days. She tried to communicate with John but was not able to form words. John was with her when she died.
Filled with remorse and plagued by guilt John refused to see Una. She blamed herself for Mabel’s death, thinking it was the row that had caused it. Una was upset for her own sake, fearing that her new-found love was over before it had begun. After some time they reconciled and Una agreed to accompany John to a spiritual medium to see if they could make contact with Mabel and get advice from her. They were lucky and Mabel’s spirit was able to forgive John and to hand over her welfare to Una.
Grieving for Mabel and contacting her spirit on a regular basis (sometimes up to five times a week) brought John and Una together. Una had never felt anything for Mabel except perhaps resentment but she went along with the game to humour John, whom she was in love with more and more. They made shrines to Mabel in the houses they lived in and put together a long paper to present to the Society for Psychical Research, based on their observations during all the séances they had had for Mabel.
John had become enthralled with the spirit world and was keen to become a member of the council of the Society for Psychical Research. The contents of the paper that she and Una had given had let slip the trio’s sexuality. John Lane Fox-Pitt, an established member of the society, was scandalised that someone of that ilk could be on the council and claimed that the other John was guilty of gross immorality. Fox-Pitt went to Una’s husband to see if he would be backed up if he were to bring a charge against the pair. Admiral Troubridge did feel his wife was losing her grip on reality and that the affair between the two women was disgusting. The charge was made formal and a trial was held. It caused a sensation; the courtroom was packed with spectators anticipating a good show with lots of juicy sex talk.
Una Troubridge
The pair of lovers came dressed in fashionable ladies’ clothes, wearing hats, gloves and all. John had decided, or Una had persuaded her, that appearance would make a huge difference to the outcome of the trial – and they were the stars of the show. But there wasn’t going to be a show after all. Una’s husband in a fit of nerves withdrew his evidence, which left Fox-Pitt standing against the women on his own. In a fast bit of back-pedalling, he too withdrew the accusation and tried to say that he had never made them in the first place. John was awarded £500 damages. How the business came to trial is confusing, as in 1920 lesbianism wasn’t a crime quite simply because it didn’t exist (according to the law). Triumphant, John and Una went back to a quiet life.
Over the next five years the couple settled down into a marriage-type arrangement. The passion of their early love was no longer there but the comfortable domesticity was. John concentrated on writing while Una hovered in the background to help her do it. In 1928 John’s best known work The Well of Loneliness, a frank examination of the problems confronting lesbian love, was published by Jonathan Cape. It did not at first cause a scandal. In fact some of the reviews suggested it was rather boring, claiming that was the worst thing about it. And if that had been all that was said about it then the book probably would have disappeared into obscurity.
The Sunday Express unexpectedly ran an editorial on it, claiming it was poisonous filth and damaging to public morality. In defence of The Well of Loneliness the publishers tried to pull together some big literary names but no one really wanted to be involved. It was not the subject matter so much as the book was not deemed worthy of all the fuss. Virginia Woolf admitted that it put her to sleep, it was so tediously written. Still, fifty-seven writers and critics were ready to testify in the book’s defence but the judge told them that their evidence would not be needed. He had already made up his mind and the book was banned.
It was already in the process of being printed in Paris and it soon hit the bookshops there with a bang. It became an instant bestseller thanks to the judge’s decision. Copies were smuggled into England and John became a writing sensation and women’s hero. It was not actually what she had wanted. John had been serious in trying to express the trouble and pain felt by someone in her position. In many ways she seems to have been a man trapped in a female body, and a conservative one at that. She could not understand the fuss made against the book nor of that made for it – and she didn’t like either.
It was five or six years later that Evguenia entered the lives of John and Una, in much the same way as Una had into John and Mabel’s. It wasn’t as a guest that the Russian woman became known to them but as a nurse to Una when she got food poisoning. John was smitten in exactly the manner that she had been with Una. Passion, lust and infatuation.
The couple of weeks spent nursing Una gave time for John to observe and discover her feelings for Evguenia. The couple went on a date after Una was convalescing and Evguenia asked John to kiss her. From there the affair escalated quickly. John sent Evguenia numerous little gifts. Then she began to pay for her rent and living expenses. With the financial support came John’s desire to dominate her new lover. Evguenia was not allowed to work, she was not allowed to do this or that, or to see whomever she wanted. If John was holding the purse strings then Evguenia had to comply with her wishes. One solution would have been to refuse to accept the money, although Evguenia confessed it made life a lot easier not having to earn for oneself. When Evguenia did not do what John requested or ordered John would punish her in some way as if she were a child (although such punishments were childish in themselves, as if the two women were playing at being father and daughter).
Manipulation worked both ways and Evguenia was just as clever at keeping John on tenterhooks. She would tell John she was unsure of her true sexual nature, that she did quite admire men so perhaps she wasn’t a real lesbian. She would also suggest that there were other attractive women options around.
Una was unhappy during all of this. John would want to agonise to her over Evguenia but Una didn’t want to know, she was jealous and hurt, just as Mabel had been all those years before when John had felt the same way about Una.
The three went on holiday, just as John and Una had with Mabel. Una tended to be left out, just as her predecessor had been. However, Evguenia was no
t particularly happy either. She tired of John’s games and her possessiveness, and she didn’t know if she really did want to continue in a lesbian affair, and certainly not in a jealous threesome.
In amongst the violent tantrums that John displayed in front of Evguenia when she didn’t get her own way, and when she was not moaning and groaning over not seeing her, John would tell Una how much she still loved and needed her, the mainstay of their relationship, in the way she had reassured Mabel.
By 1937 and with war looming in Europe, Evguenia became more interested in world affairs. John could not understand that there could be something more consuming than herself. She had sponsored Evguenia so she could live in England as the war broke. Evguenia took a typing course, against John’s wishes, and got a job with the Foreign Office. The position was important and interesting and John resented it because it meant that Evguenia was living independently of her – and if that happened then John might be in danger of losing her, which she was. Evguenia was truly sick of the situation; she had borne it for nine years already and it was time to stop.
Evguenia kept in touch with John and would chide Una for not watching John’s alcohol consumption. Una still hated Evguenia, even if she was right about John’s health. She saw the woman as nothing but an intrusion on what had been a blissful domestic union. When John had an operation on her eyes and was left unable to read or write for a few weeks, Una took care of all correspondence, including letters to Evguenia. Una at last had some control herself and made sure that much of what John dictated was heavily edited.
Other Women Page 16