1925–1933
She also serves . . .
—Chat Cat, 1927, paraphrasing John Milton
IN FEBRUARY OF 1926 GRACE Frick returned to Wellesley College to work on a master’s degree, moving into a colonial style residence at 18 Upland Road with her friend Phyllis Bartlett. She would be a graduate assistant in the Department of English, taking her place (albeit a lowly one) alongside professors Margaret Sherwood, Martha Shackford, and department chair Laura Lockwood. Appointed to assist Miss Lockwood, Grace assumed academic duties, such as reading student papers, and administrative functions.1 She also coedited the first alumnae bulletin for her graduating class, called the Chat Cat, in 1927.2 As that first issue of the Cat reported, “Our Fricky waltzed back to Wellesley and the Literature Department where she also serves who acts as Miss Lockwood’s Assistant. Departmental meetings, faculty receptions and life in Horton House, things of which we commoners dimly remember as having mystic connotations, all have a new aspect for her. Meanwhile she tackles the mastery of the German tongue in three months’ time but finds that she is an exception to the laws of heredity.”3
During spring semester 1926 a highly regarded visiting professor from Great Britain was in residence at Wellesley. Helen Darbishire was a senior tutor and lecturer at Somerville College of Oxford University. Frick took two courses from Darbishire: English Poetry of the Nineteenth Century and English Romanticism. Phyllis Bartlett was also a graduate assistant that year, and she worked with the visiting Miss Darbishire. The experience would be a turning point for her. At Darbishire’s urging, Bartlett applied to Somerville College as a candidate for the BLitt, or bachelor of letters, degree. In October of 1926 she enrolled there and undertook a critical study of William Wordsworth. During her two years at Oxford, Phyllis shared an address with Helen Darbishire within easy walking distance of the lecture and examination halls she frequented.4 Grace, meanwhile, opting not to write a thesis, completed her master’s in only three semesters. A born teacher, she could not wait to lead classes of her own.
In June of 1927 Grace returned to Missouri, where she was hired as an instructor of English at Stephens College in Columbia.5 Stephens was, like Wellesley, a private liberal arts school for women with a strong Christian—in this case, Baptist—affiliation. Established in 1833, Stephens lays claim to being the second oldest women’s college in the United States.6 The school has always taken pride in its cutting-edge programs, one of which, during World War II, was the first aviation program for women.7 Frick enthusiastically embraced the school’s outlook on the education of young women. In 1926, the year before Grace was hired, Stephens inaugurated a program in equestrian studies that may have been where Grace first developed her enthusiasm for horseback riding. The college had excellent facilities for horsewomen, and riding became for Grace a lifelong passion.
True to its innovative tradition, Stephens was looking to the future. Since 1913 it had been a two-year junior college. Coinciding with Grace’s arrival in Columbia, Stephens launched a five-year experimental reorganization of its structure. In the introductory pages to the 1928 Stephensophia, the college yearbook, President James M. Wood envisioned a four-year curriculum covering the last two years of high school and the first two years of college. The 1928 Sophie, as the yearbook was affectionately known, is a virtual celebration of Stephens’s progressive principles and its efforts to improve the quality of women’s education. Raymond A. Kent, dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Northwestern University, called the experiments at Stephens “outstanding in their significance,” adding that they were “one of the first attempts to apply scientific principles to actual procedure in the field of higher education.”8
The innovative educational policies being put into practice at Stephens in the 1920s appear all the more remarkable against their historical backdrop. The city of Columbia in that era was a world away from the East Coast bastion of liberalism where Grace had spent most of the previous six years. Central Missouri still bore deep scars from the fighting that had pitched Missourians against one another before, during, and even after the Civil War. As the Mid-Missouri Civil War Project has noted, “guerrilla violence plagued Missouri until Appomattox and beyond.” Communities were torn asunder, and “citizens killed each other in small, personal encounters.”9 This experience of a kind of strife that took place not only on traditional battlefields but also in the settings of everyday life continued to shape the culture of the region.
On April 29, 1923, only four years before Grace arrived at Stephens, a thirty-five-year-old black man was lynched in Columbia for a rape he almost certainly did not commit. James T. Scott was a janitor at the University of Missouri, right next door to Stephens College. On April 21 Regina Almstedt, the fourteen-year-old daughter of an MU German professor, identified Scott as having the same mustache and body odor as the man who had raped her the day before. Eight days later an angry mob hauled him from his jail cell. He soon found himself with a noose around his neck on the Old Stewart Road Bridge, surrounded by a thousand jeering spectators, many of them MU students and pillars of the Columbia community. Scott insisted on his innocence, evoking his own teenage daughter and alleging that one of his cellmates had confessed to raping the young white girl. He was hung from the same bridge under which Regina was assaulted. Not until November of 2010 would Scott’s record be corrected.10
Knowing Grace Frick’s youthful sensitivity to the race issue, it is easy to imagine with what horror she learned of Scott’s lynching. Like many college towns, Columbia tends now toward the political left. But in Grace’s time Stephens students often descended from families that sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War.11 Frick made a point of including racial tolerance as one of the specific aims of her literature curriculum at Stephens.
Stephens was a small school with a close-knit faculty. During her three years there, Grace came particularly under the influence of her colleague Louise Dudley, who began her extended career at Stephens in 1920 at the age of thirty-five.12 Two years later, she was acting dean of women. Dudley had grown up in Kentucky and received a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Georgetown College in her hometown. In 1910, after lengthy research stints in Paris and London, she received her doctorate from Bryn Mawr College. In 1918, like Grace’s brother Fred, Dudley was in France helping with the war effort—in her case as a social worker in French munitions camps under the direction of the Young Women’s Christian Association.13 She loved to travel, and France was one of her favorite destinations.
Dudley was well known at Stephens for her charm, her “taste for adventure,” and her all-embracing love of the arts.14 In 1927, the year Grace arrived, Dudley would establish and head up the Humanities Division at Stephens. John Crighton, a retired Stephens instructor, later noted that “in the late 1920s, Dr. Louise Dudley found no model in the world of education for the invaluable, integrated study of music, literature and art, so Dr. Dudley and her staff created a groundbreaking Humanities core that inspired a nation.”15 Grace Frick was a key member of that staff. As such, she learned a lot about building a well-rounded educational program for young women in a junior college environment. She also made a meaningful contribution to her mentor’s conception of the humanities. In 1940 Dudley inscribed a copy of the first edition of her coauthored The Humanities: Applied Aesthetics to “Grace Frick, with my love and appreciation of her part in this book.”16 When the fourth edition came out twenty-seven years later, she sent Grace a copy of the book again, writing, “I shall always be grateful to Grace Frick who helped me teach my first class in The Humanities.”17
Learning her craft at Dudley’s side, Grace also followed in her mentor’s footsteps as faculty sponsor of the Book Club, one of the college’s most popular extracurricular organizations. Meetings were often held in Frick’s apartment, and refreshments were always a prominent feature of the gathering. The 1929 Stephensophia described one Book Club session as follows: “Picture a cold, disagreeable afternoon, the wind moaning, the snow flakes falling, and inside a cozy apartment, an interested group absorbed in a review of the latest books. After the review has been given, tea is served with dainty sandwiches, and a spirited discussion of the book at hand begins.” These meetings may have been the inspiration for a type of “edutainment” that Frick would develop and perfect over the years, apparently on the theory that the most enjoyable way to impart knowledge of other cultures is through a young person’s stomach. One evening in 1929, for example, the Book Club held a reading of Russian plays that was accompanied by “true Russian refreshments”;18 the following year there was “an afternoon with Japanese poetry with tea served by dainty maidens, dressed in the native costume.”19 Louise Dudley knew that Grace made the humanities come alive for her students. A warm friendship between the two women endured throughout the rest of Dudley’s long life.20
Another member of the Humanities faculty, Hazel Mikkelson, is almost certainly responsible for a second personal memento of Grace’s years at Stephens that has made its way down to us. It is an inscribed copy of the Autobiography of the sixteenth-century Florentine goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, who seems to be at least as well known for his colorful life as for his artwork.21 From an adolescent brawl that forced him to flee his native Florence to the murder of a rival goldsmith in Rome to an embezzlement charge that got him locked up at the Castel Sant’Angelo, Cellini was often on the wrong side of the law. While Cellini’s autobiography is an embellished relation of his life, it is considered to be uniquely valuable as a passionate participant’s account of the artistic, social, and political tensions that characterized the late Renaissance.22 Grace’s copy of the book is inscribed,
To Grace,
With love and best wishes for a happy Christmas and New Year
From Hazel
Columbia, Missouri,
December 25, 1927.
Mikkelson was an instructor of violin, teaching in the Music department with Grace’s housemates Nesta Williams and Honor Winer. Though Grace was particularly drawn to the literature of Elizabethan England, Cellini’s account of his trials and achievements, conflicts and adventures in continental Europe during that same century would have fascinated her.
With the end of her first year at Stephens in the spring of 1928, Grace was free to spend the summer as she chose. Her friend Phyllis Bartlett was at Oxford, which gave Grace the perfect opportunity to make her maiden voyage to the country whose literary masters were the central focus of her professional life. On Wednesday, June 6, third-class ticket in hand, Grace boarded the Cunard Line’s RMS Berengaria, bound for England, at New York City’s West Fourteenth Street pier. Years later, in trying to convince her friends Paul and Gladys Minear to accept from her a financial boost as they prepared to embark upon a year abroad, Grace wrote about a windfall that she had received just before leaving for England: “The first time I went to Europe, I had an unexpected gift of a hundred dollars at the Pier on the moment of departure. The exhilaration of that moment (when I was already taken care of, and had only my own fares to think of) is something that I would like to pass on.”23
On arriving in Southampton on June 13, Grace traveled to Oxford, where she would stay with Phyllis in Helen Darbishire’s Beaumont Street townhouse. Phyllis had successfully completed her Wordsworth project and passed her viva, or oral exam, four days earlier.24 Grace was there to watch Phyllis receive her British degree at a ceremony held on June 28.25 Phyllis was a spunky young woman with a sense of adventure. Despite her scholarly prowess, she never took herself too seriously. Years later, she would make light of her British academic success in a manner that friends say was typical of her. Referring to the fur lining of the ceremonial hood she wore, along with an Oxford velvet beret instead of a mortar board, for occasions requiring academic regalia, Phyllis jokingly told her Queens College student Ann Birstein, “It’s supposed to be ermine, but it’s mangy spotted rabbit!”26
Grace took advantage of this first trip to England to pursue her literary and theatrical interests on their native soil. Stratford-upon-Avon was only an hour away. The Oxford Playhouse was a one-minute walk down Beaumont Street from Phyllis’s lodgings, and the Oxford University Dramatics Society was staging John Galsworthy’s Escape there that summer, as well as the English premiere of Eugene O’Neill’s Where the Cross Is Made.27 But Phyllis had completed her degree, and she was eager to reward herself with some less bookish recreation. Like Grace, she loved hiking and traveling. Phyllis had spent the previous summer touring London, Paris, Heidelberg, and Zurich. Now she and Grace would join up with their Wellesley friend Rusty Montgomery for a summer ramble in the north of England. As the Chat Cat would report, the three chums “toured the Lake Country and the hi-ways and byways of merrie England.”28
En route to the lakes region, on July 2, 1928, the women stopped in York, where Grace bought herself a copy of the Haworth Edition of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë.29 It was a story, as the many passages annotated by Grace suggest, that had resonance for her. Charlotte Brontë’s mother had died when she was five years old, leaving Charlotte and five sisters and brothers behind. When her older sisters fell victim to “consumption,” the eleven-year-old Charlotte became a motherly presence for her siblings and, even after the success of Jane Eyre years later, remained devoted to caring for her elderly father. She disagreed with her sisters Emily and Anne about what makes a compelling novelistic heroine, and the popularity of “plain, small, and unattractive” Jane proved her right. She even went so far as to consider her sisters “morally wrong” to make their heroines beautiful, an attitude appreciatively underlined in Grace’s copy of Gaskell’s Life.30
Another book purchased on this trip casts a literary light on the Wellesley chums’ British walking tour: William Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes, bought by Grace on July 5 at Read’s Book Shop in the Lake District village of Grasmere. Wordsworth spent most of his life in the English lake country and describes the region in his 1802 poem “A Farewell” as “the loveliest spot that man hath ever found.” On the blank pages at the back of the Guide, Grace noted that she and her friends took “a series of walks about Easedale,” featuring a well-known mountain lake.31
After this trek in the lake country, Rusty Montgomery went her own way, and Phyllis set about convincing a reluctant Grace that they should visit Paris together. Grace had been in England for less than a month, and she had spent a long time preparing for this trip. She had not yet gone to half the places that she wanted to see. But Phyllis was insistent, and Grace finally gave in. After all, their Wellesley classmate “M.G.” Coates was spending the summer with her family on rue Jasmin in the sixteenth arrondissement.32 It would be marvelous to see her. Coates had finished nursing school and would be working for the Henry Street Nursing Staff in New York City that fall. As the Chat Cat reported, “She spent the summer in Paris, where . . . most of Wellesley College visited her. Grace Frick and Phyllis Bartlett were two of M.G.’s visitors. Alice [E. K. Wood] visited her too but unfortunately missed both Gracie and Phil.”33
Grace fell in love with the City of Light and, forsaking a planned return to England, decided to remain there through the end of her summer vacation. Phyllis knew Paris quite well, and for Grace’s first fortnight in the city she served as her escort. Over the following month, Grace continued on her own to immerse herself in the architectural, artistic, and culinary splendor of the French capital, meandering along narrow streets or loping down wide, tree-lined boulevards, taking in shows, trying out her French, marveling at the wealth and diversity of the city’s cultural treasures. She did not leave France until August 21, when she boarded the SS California in Le Havre. Ten days later, having had the time of her life, she was back in New York.34
Some twenty years after the fact, Grace reflected on that first taste of Paris in a letter to Paul and Gladys Minear, whom she wished to help choose a destination in Europe to tour briefly with their young children. Grace had been taken off guard at twenty-five by the cultural and religious differences between France, a Latin and Catholic country, and America: “I remember how strongly I felt the difference myself,” she wrote,
and how ill-prepared I was for it. Forgive me if I attribute some of my own limitations to you, even when I know that some of your preparation is much better than mine was; but I do know that the first shock of the differences will be strong for you as it was for me, and you will not have the time in France, and perhaps the personal guidance, that I was lucky enough to have there even on my first visit of six weeks, long before I knew any French people there.
Surprisingly, given how central France would one day become in Grace’s life, she goes on to say,
I did not even want to go to Paris on my first visit to Europe. . . . I was sure that I knew too little of France to understand it or like it, and equally sure that a single summer in England was far too little for my desires at the time. An American friend persuaded me that I ought to go with her to Paris while she could offer me some guidance, and while a classmate of ours was in residence there. Imagine my surprise, therefore, in realizing on the first evening of my arrival that Paris is as beautiful as everyone says that it is. I changed my plans and stayed there and only there till time to sail for home. But I was a freer lance than you will be, perhaps. My mind is divided for you!35
However free a lance she may have been that summer, Grace returned to Columbia in September to resume her instructorship at Stephens. Unearthing information about the ninety-year-old appointment of a faculty member at a college that had not yet begun to keep systematic records is no mean feat. There are no personnel files from that time, no contracts from which one might learn the terms of Frick’s employment, no general information about faculty salaries; not even a photograph of Grace in any of the college yearbooks from that era.36 Fortunately, however, one relic of the late 1920s was preserved all these years in the Stephens College Archives that, despite its uninspiring title, is nothing less than Grace Frick’s paean to the value of literature. It is an 11,000-word, bound and numbered typescript, composed after Frick left Stephens, to be used by her successors as a guide to teaching English literature to students who may not have had the benefit of serious literary training. Entitled “A Survey Unit for the Study of English Literature,” the text reveals not only the scope of Frick’s knowledge of her field but also how deeply she had engaged with Louise Dudley’s vision of the interconnectedness of the arts.
Frick’s “Survey Unit” is a distillation of what one dedicated young instructor learned teaching English II, Introduction to English Literature, over the course of three years. Into each successive syllabus Grace incorporated lessons from the previous year or years, finally extracting from all of them what she deemed would be most helpful to the person who would follow in her footsteps. Her pedagogical strategy evolved over the period from a primarily lecture-based format during her first year to a mainly discussion-oriented approach with only one formal lecture during her third. She would be right at home in the classroom today.
Frick saw literature as a record of civilization and the arts more generally as “a subject which deals primarily with meaning and value in life.”37 She sought to introduce each student to all of the great arts as a foundation for “increasing his knowledge in these fields and thereby enriching his own life.” The text used in the course, at least in Grace’s second and third years at Stephens, was Louise Dudley’s Study of Literature, the preface of which emphasizes “knowledge and understanding of the great classics” and “the ability to give an intelligent account of one’s literary likes and dislikes.”38 In addition to training young women to judge for themselves, Grace’s summa places stress on intellectual tolerance.39 It is divided into six major topics, all of them covered in detail, with specific recommendations regarding the most propitious timing for the sequencing of increasingly complex course content.
Regarding the relevance of literary study to modern life, especially for young female students, Frick presses home the point that “for the twentieth century woman an adequate means of communication is just as essential as it is now and always has been for men. The college girl of today expects to be able to speak readily in public, whether it be in formal address, in the reading of a prepared paper, or in informal discussion at a club or public meeting.” More important, she notes, literature introduces us to people and ways of life we might not otherwise encounter: “Most of us come to college with a fairly limited experience, necessarily limited because of our age and sometimes limited by other conditions. We continue to learn more about life, of course, each day of our existence but by studying the records of past experience we can begin at once to enlarge our own experience and to prepare ourselves for fuller and richer living.”40
Not only does every human being have “a desire for and a capacity for enjoying the truly beautiful things in life,” a quality that we sometimes refer to as “our aesthetic nature,” but studying the arts broadens and ennobles the mind. Frick makes a point of zeroing in on a specific type of mind broadening:
Through the best literature of different periods and different races, we can gain a sort of vicarious experience which may serve as the first step toward greater universal sympathy.
Too often we are not conscious of how many and how petty our individual prejudices are until we have those prejudices challenged by the thought processes of some artist. In a class of students composed both of northerners and southerners a sequence of poems from an anthology of Negro poetry proved startling because the poet had imagined for himself a black Madonna tenderly soothing a little black Christ. No one in the class would admit that she had a race prejudice and yet each member of the class was inclined at first thought to resent the fact that a Negro poet should picture Mary and her child as members of his race rather than of the white race. The moral of this experience is obvious. We do need our sympathies “stretched,” often in the place where we least suspect the need of this “stretching.”41
Grace, who once saw from afar a Ku Klux Klan cross-burning, does not preach to her students from on high; rather, she counts herself among them, thus allowing the young women to recognize themselves without feeling that their biases should be a source of shame.42 For Grace, the scholarly point of view is an attitude of open-mindedness and one that should extend beyond the bounds of intellectual inquiry to all of life.43
Of course, Grace also extols the virtues of studying French, German, Latin, and Greek, as well as history, religion, economics, psychology, philosophy, and sociology, for what they can contribute to a deeper understanding of literary works. Nor should one overlook the other arts, such as drama, dance, the visual arts, and particularly music. But most surprising, given Grace’s Elizabethan bent, may be how current her recommendations were with regard to contemporary writers. In speaking of what one can learn from books about places one has never seen, Frick gives the example of a British novel, only three years old at the time she was writing, that has since become a modernist classic: “In 1927 Virginia Woolf, a prominent contemporary English novelist, published To the Lighthouse which has its setting in the Hebrides, and the theme of this novel is brought out as much by the wild storm winds of this remote region, as by the characters themselves.” She finds “an unusual number of new currents both in poetry and prose, and particularly in drama in this post-war period.” Two leaders whom she singles out for mention, representing disparate tendencies of modern poetry, had recently died: the American modernist Amy Lowell in 1925 and the more conventional Englishman Robert Bridges in 1930. Bridges did important work on prosody that “dispens[ed] with classical models entirely and return[ed] to the early English accentual system.” Lowell left behind her “not only a series of volumes of poetry, but the finest scholarly biography of the poet Keats which has ever been written.”44
The contemporary British and American authors whom Frick saw as advancing new methods in both poetry and prose were Virginia Woolf, Humbert Wolfe, E. M. Forster, and Gertrude Stein. Her “Survey” discusses the husband-and-wife team of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, whose Hogarth Press published innovators such as T. S. Eliot; Sigmund Freud; Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell; and Gertrude Stein. Stein, she notes, “has created a sensation in modern literature by dispensing with the element of consecutive development of ideas in her literary work. She throws her chief emphasis upon the sounds of the words, and in her more extreme work, makes apparently no appeal to thought other than through the repetition of certain sounds and combinations.” In what is surely the most ironic passage in her essay, Frick comments on one literary genre whose glory days she thought were gone: “Historical novels continue with a steady popularity although we can point to no examples in the twentieth century which give much promise of becoming classics.”45 Little did she know what a role she would play in transforming that state of affairs!
When Grace arrived at Stephens she was a healthy, energetic twenty-five-year-old. In the normal course of things, she would have been exploring her sexuality, whether with men or with women. Commentators have wondered about the nature of Grace’s relationship with Phyllis Bartlett, who eventually married late in life, and with Ruth Hall, who remained single, but there is no documentary basis on which to speculate that either of these friendships was anything other than platonic.46 Nor is there any evidence from her years at Wellesley that Grace ever dated anyone while she was there. In fact, Florence Codman, the only college chum we know of whose primary adult relationship was lesbian, told Josyane Savigneau that she was “not sure if Grace had had other women in her life before Marguerite. Or even other love affairs.”47 We do know, however, thanks to a postcard sent to Grace in 1933, that she had a special friend at Yale University. “How are you and your friend, to whom please remember me,” wrote Marianne Zerner from Berne, Switzerland, where she was studying German literature and philology.48 “Friend” was often a code word for “lover” in that era—and for many lesbians, including Yourcenar, well beyond that time.
As familiar as Frick was with contemporary British and American literature, she could hardly have failed to hear the hue and cry that greeted Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness on both sides of the Atlantic in midsummer 1928. The book, which was released in Great Britain during Grace’s first stay in Paris, quickly made its way to both France and the United States. It wasn’t banned in Boston or New York, but Hall’s publisher, Jonathan Cape, was brought up on charges of obscenity. The ensuing trial brought the book and the issue of “sexual inversion” to the attention of an increasingly larger public. Forster and Woolf lent their stature to the fight against suppressing The Well, penning a joint letter to the Nation and Atheneum and going so far as to attend the obscenity trial. The denizens of Bloomsbury were by and large unenthused about the traditional, even antiquated, style of Hall’s novel, but they were deeply disturbed by the implications that censorship of such a work would have on the creative freedom of all writers.49 The British magistrate nonetheless ordered that the book be destroyed, finding that a literary plea to tolerate a vice as insidious as homosexuality could not possibly be anything other than obscene.
In the United States, meanwhile, The Well had gone through six reprintings before the British verdict was rendered that November. It faced obscenity challenges here too, but, held to a more lenient standard than in the British legal system, it was cleared of all charges in April of 1929. In its first year of U.S. publication, The Well sold more than one hundred thousand copies. It also prospered in France, where issues of sexuality were less apt to scandalize.
Eleven years later the fictionalized account of another lesbian life, this time an American one, was released: Diana, a Strange Autobiography, by the pseudonymous Diana Frederics. By the quality of its prose and the forthrightness of its narrative, it was a remarkable work for its day and remains one still. Diana tells the story of a brilliant and intrepid young woman who, already as an adolescent, confronts her homosexual leanings head-on. With a modicum of support from a respected sibling, and despite the many obstacles strewn along her path, Diana comes to accept who she is and forges for herself an independent life as a teacher and writer. Unlike most other such novels of the 1920s and 1930s, Diana ends with its protagonist’s professional and sexual fulfillment. If it merits mention here, it is because Diana’s real-life author, Frances V. Rummell, and Grace Frick taught at Stephens College together.50 Frances was four or five years younger than Grace, and she taught French. When Rummell started working at Stephens, Grace had just been dazzled by her discovery of Paris. She and Rummell both taught in the oh-so-interconnected humanities, more than likely in the same building. As outgoing as Grace was, and knowing what a difference a mentor can make from her experience at Wellesley, she undoubtedly welcomed young Frances into the fold, doing her best to smooth her transition from student to teacher.
Thanks to Diana, a Strange Autobiography, we can picture what it might have been like to be a lesbian faculty member at a women’s college in the late 1920s. Like Grace, the fictional Diana had gotten her master’s degree at an all-female school in Massachusetts. A few years later, having made an eye-opening tour of Europe, she returned to that college and its small town with her woman lover to teach French. Professionally, Diana was a standout. Hired to cover technical language courses, she soon was asked to give a seminar in nineteenth-century French literature. Everything seemed to be working out perfectly, until one day she was called into the office of the dean for an unspecified reason. The dean’s embarrassed opening question was, said Diana, “to my horror, clue enough” as to his purpose: “‘Do you mind telling me how long your friend—I understand she is an artist—has been with you?’” Trying to find the right words, the dean adds, “‘The teachers resent your lack of sociability. . . . I believe you should know there have been innuendoes here and there about your friendship.’” The school did not want to lose Diana because of her excellent teaching and scholarship. The dean suggested that she live—alone—the following year in a campus dormitory and make an effort to befriend other faculty members. Diana’s mind raced: “I was so tense my hands were stiff. Of course I had been all kinds of a fool in my wishful thinking, and now I was discovered. Dishonor and shame pressed in on me—such anguish as I have never known.”51
Grace was never the subject of such an incident during her years at Stephens, but lesbian educators of that era lived with the fear of exposure every day. Many young women undoubtedly chose to deny, ignore, or carefully conceal any same-sex attraction they might feel for fear of losing their job or their dignity. Was Grace one of their number? Or did she cross her personal Rubicon in response to the singular allure of an extraordinary Frenchwoman? We may never have a definitive answer to these questions, but there are indications that Grace was more comfortable with her sexuality than even the supposedly notorious womanizer Marguerite Yourcenar.
While she was at Stephens, Grace became part of a vibrant academic community. She loved her work, and she was inspired by her colleagues. Her horizons were also inestimably broadened, beyond the walls of the classroom, by her trip to England and by her spontaneous discovery of the movable feast that was Paris. She did not know then what the future had in store—and it held many surprises. But she knew that she had found her calling. It was time to craft a plan that would take her, like so many other gifted graduates of Wellesley’s Department of English Literature, to Yale University.
Grace left Columbia in June of 1930 to return to Kansas City. She would move back in with the LaRues until the fall of 1931. Also in the house besides Uncle George and Aunt Dolly were Grace’s older brother Gage, who at thirty-one was still unmarried and working for the LaRue Printing Company, and her eighteen-year-old cousin Nancy. Nancy had transferred from Southwest High to Notre Dame de Sion in February of 1929 and was in her senior year there.52 She was not a scholar like Grace, but she was an affectionate and caring young woman.53 Fred, the eldest of the Frick siblings, had married by this time and left home.
Grace spent the academic year 1930–31 commuting forty miles to the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where she took two advanced courses.54 In the spring of 1931 she was accepted by Yale’s PhD program in English literature. Yale was still an all-male undergraduate school, but the administration allowed qualified women to undertake graduate degrees. Frick moved to New Haven that October, taking a room in the women’s graduate residence at 158 Whitney Avenue. That stately building, with its spacious back lawn and lovely porch, occupied a choice spot next to the president’s house and gardens.55 It was there that Grace met and befriended Paul and Gladys Minear.
Paul was working on his doctorate in the New Testament at Yale. He and his wife had taken a position as the host and hostess of the women’s residence in the fall of 1930. Gladys also worked in the circulation department at Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library to supplement the couple’s income. As she once wrote of their house-hosting experience, “Paul kept the coal furnace functioning, and the maids, who cleaned every day, were responsible to me. I think there were about twenty women in those gorgeous great rooms.”56
Grace would later tell some younger friends about that era and the Minears,
They had a sort of ground-floor apartment in this old inn, on Whitney Avenue in New Haven, in which the women were quartered as a dormitory. It was old, and there was this enormous furnace, which Paul’s job was to fire. He’d get up at four in the morning, and sometimes it would go and sometimes it wouldn’t. He’d have to get up again at five, while he was writing his doctoral dissertation. My room was a tiny thing over their kitchen, and there was a back stairs. . . . I had the liberty of going down and getting anything I wanted, particularly bananas, out of their larder. They were Middle Westerners by the way, people from a small town in Iowa who dairy farmed. Tops! I never saw any two people open to every opportunity that that university city had to offer.57
Grace would remain at 158 Whitney, raiding the Minears’ stash of bananas, until June of 1933.
At the end of her first year at Yale, Frick told her former Wellesley classmates what it was like to be a woman in a predominantly male environment: “My life is that of a ‘Yale Lady,’ as we are not too happily designated by the less kind. No one treats us as badly as the name implies, however, and life is more than fair, I can tell you. My courses are corking and I have four splendid people, Tucker Brooke, Karl Young, [Alexander] Witherspoon and [William Clyde] DeVane. If I could just get one or two things half-way finished all would be serene.”58
Grace was no slouch, however. According to her transcript from Yale, she satisfied three foreign language requirements—in French, German, and Latin—in one fell swoop, on October 14, 1931, not long after her arrival in New Haven. Yale granted her a year’s worth of credit toward the PhD for her Wellesley master’s degree and the graduate courses she had taken at the University of Kansas. She passed her oral examinations for the doctorate on January 20, 1932, after only one semester of coursework.59
Frick’s professors at Yale were, of course, all men; indeed, the first female instructor to get tenure in the English department there was not appointed until 1957.60 During her first year Grace took four yearlong courses ranging from Medieval Drama through the Victorian Poets. Predictably, she excelled in the subjects she loved, earning Yale’s highest mark in both English Drama, 1500–1642, and Victorian Poets. She made do with passing the other two.
Frick excelled again in 1932–33 in Tucker Brooke’s Shakespeare seminar. Knowing Grace’s love of the Bard, Phyllis Bartlett gave her J. Dover Wilson’s Essential Shakespeare, fresh off the presses, for Christmas that year.61 Phyllis by this time was teaching English and working on her own PhD at the University of Wisconsin. The Shakespeare volume was both a memento of the 1928 trip they had taken to Stratford-upon-Avon and a useful addition to Grace’s library. On June 6, 1933, Yale officially accepted Grace’s dissertation proposal. Under the direction of DeVane, she would investigate not an Elizabethan poet or playwright but “The First Period of the Poetry of George Meredith from 1851 to 1862.”62 This was neither a topic of her choosing nor an author who interested her.63 Nonetheless, her plan upon completing her coursework was to spend the next year writing her dissertation back home in Kansas City. That is not exactly what happened, however.