Catherine Clay examines friendships between a group of women writers active in the interwar period, with a view to shedding new light on the connection between their professional work and their intimate lives. The book begins and ends with a discussion of a stylish London reception Lady Margaret Rhondda held in June 1932 at the Dorchester hotel for her feminist weekly Time and Tide. All save one of the writers who figure in Clay's cast of characters were present: Stella Benson, Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Naomi Mitchison, and Lady Rhondda. The sixth writer was Margaret Storm Jameson.
All six are well known. There is extensive biographical scholarship and critical analysis on most of them, in addition to their own forays into autobiography. Clay cites (although she does not always employ) much of this work and in addition she has done considerable research of her own in the rich primary sources.
The questions Clay poses are not new. Although some of her interpretations are at variance with the conclusions of other scholars, British Women Writers falls squarely in a tradition informed by the historical and literary-critical lesbian analysis of the past twenty-five years. “Female friendship represents a significant threat to male power” (62), Clay asserts, because intimacy between women almost invariably involves overt or covert eroticism. In her conclusion, Clay explains that a major purpose of her study has been to “confound artificial barriers between erotic and non erotic relationships” (164). Throughout she argues for the presence of “traces of lesbianism” even where these traces are expressed as “homophobia.” There are in addition many references to “feminism and visual culture” drawn from the work of Deborah Cherry, and she often employs postcolonial critics like Anne McClintock to analyze the role that travel and tourism played in the lives of her six writers.
British Women Writers is a serious study that contributes to an ongoing discussion. But too often the historical subjects and the reader are swamped by Clay's use of literary criticism. In any examination of historical actors what we can actually learn about the individuals must take precedence over questions that arise from the critical texts alone. Too often Clay allows the critical cart to lead the horse. Take, for example, her interpretation of the friendship between Vera Brittain and Storm Jameson. In her discussion of this intense relationship Clay is far too free with her array of critical tools.
In one letter concerning a trip to Italy, Jameson tells Brittain she is feeling “poor spirited.” In Clay's hands this becomes “self ghosting” which she attributes to “a further enactment of the homophobic fears which govern this friendship” (81). On a trip to Russia that the two women planned in 1935 but never took, Clay asserts: “in early 1935, travel again became a site for this irresolution between desire and denial” (81). Again Jameson declines another trip: “You know I’d rather go away with you than anyone. And it would be such incredible fun to be together on such a voyage” (81). But Jameson explains to Brittain that much as she would like to go, her husband needs her. Clay interprets Jameson's response as “panic” and claims that “central to this panic is the spectre of lesbianism against which both Jameson's and Brittain's heterosexual identity is asserted (through the assumed responsibilities towards their husbands)” (82).
In this “case study” Clay's intrusive critical voice distorts the correspondence between the two women. Jameson and Brittain regarded themselves and each other as heterosexual. Clay does not dispute this. On what grounds, then, assert that their heterosexuality masks “homophobia”? Like Clay, I have examined this correspondence, and in my view the interpretation Clay presents is both implausible and forced.
The writers Clay studies are a fascinating bunch, well worthy of ongoing examination. British Women Writers captures their vividness, their glamour, and their privileged status. Some twenty years after 1935, the year of Jameson's and Brittain's planned trip to the USSR, sociologists Michael Young and Peter Willmott conducted interviews for their classic study of working-class family life, Family and Kinship in East London (London, 1957). Many of their informants had hardly ever set foot out of Bethnal Green, let alone London. While the mothers in Family and Kinship do have strong ties to other women, those ties were almost invariably with their mothers, daughters, or other family members. Moreover, those ties were built on shared work. Young and Willmott's Bethnal Green women, like those in historian Ellen Ross's study Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (New York, 1993) live lives too hard to allow for intimate relationships with other women.
In contrast the brilliant and fortunate interwar writers who are the subject of Clay's book were blessed with satisfying work, leisure, power, and authority. Their intimate friendships did threaten male power, but not, I would suggest, because of eroticism, whether overt or “covert.” Instead, as professional writers and as intimate friends they challenged a principle central to male dominance: that women of every social class must put family first. That challenge is at the heart of feminism rather than lesbian sexuality.
