Suffice it that now I conceive of the task before mankind as a task essentially of rearrangement, as a problem in relationships, extremely complex and difficult indeed, but credibly solvable.
H.G. Wells, The Passionate Friends (1913)
A TRAIN RIDE OF ABOUT AN HOUR out of London leads to the place where H.G. Wells and his wife spent the rest of their married life. In Essex, nestled in mildly rolling countryside near the town of Dunmow, a visitor finds himself near land once owned by Frances, Lady Warwick, an attractive and eccentric woman, for many years mistress of the Prince of Wales.1
Wells found the place in 1911, while spending a weekend with R.D. Blumenfeld, editor of the Daily Express. Charmed by the area and intrigued by Lady Warwick, he soon arranged through Blumenfeld to rent the Old Rectory on her estate at Little Easton. She was delighted to let the house to him, and by the spring of 1912 Wells and his family had settled comfortably into the red-brick Georgian house, although they decided to maintain their London house for a year to ease the transition. From its windows, one could look out over the spacious lawns towards cornfields trimmed with dogwood hedges and see the woods and the unkempt pastures, and beyond them the village nestled between the soft waves of the hills.2
The prospect of leaving Hampstead came as a relief to husband and wife. Wells had never really warmed to the place, and once the affair with Amber had cooled there was little reason for remaining, except that it provided a possible locale for dalliances. Catherine lived in the hope that perhaps H.G.’s constant restlessness would diminish with the move, that perhaps, at the age of forty-five, he might find his need for affairs a phase through which he had finally passed.
Now that the scandal surrounding Amber Reeves had faded, and she was safely married, friends and acquaintances vied once again for visits. On weekends the rectory was seldom without guests, and Wells noted with approval and relief the enthusiasm with which Jane threw herself into making it into a comfortable, permanent home. But if the outward circumstances of his life had changed, little was different within the man. Even before the decision to leave Hampstead, he had found a new paramour in Elizabeth von Arnim, the Australian-born widow of a Prussian count who had died the previous year. A novelist and playwright of Wells’s own age, the wealthy woman had long wanted to meet him. In November 1910, she wrote him an effusive letter praising “the aching, desolating truth” told by The New Machiavelli.3
Wells was once again enmeshed. When Catherine was away from Church Row, he entertained Elizabeth there. “She’s a nice little friend to have,” he wrote to his wife, reassuring her that the morals of the countess were strict and that “sad experience” had “taught her that if she so much as thinks of anything she has a baby.”4 The reality was rather different. In her 1914 novel, The Pastor’s Wife, Elizabeth wrote of her relationship with Wells. At one point the Wells character, Ingram, tells his paramour that she is “a perfect seething vessel of independent happiness.” “Teach me to seethe,” she replies.5
The escapade with Elizabeth began, like so many of them, with quiet walks and the great man’s excited chatter. But Elizabeth was an elusive quarry, animated and outgoing yet with an aristocratic scorn that ensured the kind of distance that attracts. Throughout 1911 and 1912, they accompanied each other frequently in London. Later she rented a flat near him, and on occasion she used Lady Warwick’s home as her “weekend house.” On one occasion, if Wells is to be believed, they made love in the woods on a copy of The Times featuring an outraged letter from Mrs. Humphry Ward denouncing the moral standards of modern youth.6
He began to urge that they spend time together in Ireland. She resisted his suggestion, but later they did travel together to Italy. She maintained her independence, and it made him a jealous man. He continued to pursue her, and they carried on their affair, as he put it, “with an impudent impunity. We flitted off abroad and had amusing times in Amsterdam, Bruges, Ypres, Arras, Paris, Locarno, Orta, Florence – and no one was a bit the wiser.” He wrote beseeching letters, once even arriving unannounced at her Swiss home. Eventually she made her one big mistake: she began to demand “depth of feeling” from him, and it was not in him to offer it. Elizabeth wanted a serious relationship, and he wanted fun. She began to ridicule Jane, and told him he was but “half a lover.” The affair had run its course, and the relationship slowly matured into an enduring friendship but nothing more.7
Catherine let the affair with the countess expend itself, as she knew it would, pouring her energies instead into Little Easton. But it was clear that her husband remained dissatisfied with his lot. At Hampstead, and now at Little Easton, he had been hard at work examining his life anew in his next book, entitled Marriage, to be released in the fall of 1912. Jane took particular care with this novel, correcting the proofs and seeing it through the press.8 But no doubt Catherine read it with a different purpose altogether. What wife would not want to know the goings-on in the deepest recesses of her husband’s mind, particularly when relations with other women affected his view of marriage – his own as well as the institution in general?
Predictably enough, the book was about the frustrations of wedlock. Catherine could take some comfort in the fact that in it a husband and wife work through their difficulties, even though it took a visit to freezing Labrador to sort them out. Told almost entirely from the man’s point of view, the early part of the novel recounted Wells’s experiences with Isabel. But Catherine was there. She was now Marjorie, a woman who could not comprehend any meaning in life beyond the material possessions that made for a comfortable existence. “She was dreaming, and in a sense she was thinking of beautiful things. But only mediately. She was thinking how very much she would enjoy spending freely and vigorously, quite a considerable amount of money, – heaps of money.”9 Could H.G. not see that she truly dreamt of beautiful things, and ones that were not mere objects or baubles? Or that it had been he who kept insisting that their marriage could not survive unless they lived in a manner that ensured him his creature comforts?
In the end, once more the husband of a Wells novel gave up a promising future in science for the sake of domestic peace – another Wells protagonist who truly commits himself to no one. When the book appeared, some readers were relieved at the author’s retreat from his earlier apostasy, in life and in fiction. Sir Frederick Macmillan was one of these, for he published Marriage with evident relief, thereby bringing Wells back into his stable.
Not all readers reacted to the book in this way. There was little civility and a lot of scorn for Marriage in a review that appeared in the Freewoman, a feminist publication, in September. In the lengthy essay, a critic named Rebecca West tore the book apart. She ridiculed Wells’s feminism and the falseness of the married couple’s intellectualized affectations. Wells, she said, was “the old maid of novelists,” uttering the platitudes of a phony feminism. What happens to Marjorie, the wife, for the sake of the marriage? She broods on her own worthlessness, and the author uses this “as the basis of a generalisation as to the worthlessness of all woman.”10 Miss Rebecca West would have none of this.
The review was devastating, but it had been pulled off with such wit, such cleverness, and with such clarity of insight into the false values of the book that it piqued Wells’s interest in the reviewer. Just who was this impertinent but penetrating woman?
Catherine Wells had every right to be intrigued by the writer when she learned of her review. This unknown woman seemed to have looked through the windows of all her homes and seen the purpose for which Jane had come into existence. It must have startled her to read that “one knows at once that Marjorie is speaking in a crisis of wedded chastity when she says at regular intervals, ‘Oh, my dear! … Oh, my dear!’ or at moments of ecstasy, ‘oh, my dear! My dear!’ For Mr. Wells’s heroines who are living under legal difficulties say, ‘My man!’ or ‘Master!’ ” The word “master” was not for Catherine, even as the compliant Jane; but how many times had she caught herself saying “My dear” in moments of embarrassment or self-doubt? Was there something in Catherine that wanted to cheer when this West woman pilloried life in the “great, beautiful house,” filled with expensive belongings and “creatures of genius and silly, chattering people”?11 Often, she would later write, she felt she was “only a part of the wallpaper against which those more brilliant lives were played out.” While the glamorous people around her played cards, she remained “alone and unnoted as in the company of clockwork toys.”12
She and her husband knew that in important ways their married life was an elaborate sham, and Rebecca West had managed uncannily to see through it. Catherine acquiesced to H.G.’s suggestion that the writer be invited to Little Easton for a weekend to explain what she had meant by calling Wells “pseudo-scientific” in her review. Both were more than a little curious. When they greeted her at the train station in Dunmow, they were surprised to discover that “Rebecca West” was the nom de plume of a mere slip of a girl. She was nineteen years old, and her name was actually Cicily Fairfield.
Before the weekend was over, Catherine may well have recognized that her husband was smitten by the young house guest. He was attracted by the broad brow, the dark and expressive but troubled eyes, the soft mouth and small chin.13 But what struck husband and wife alike was the way this child-woman assumed from the outset that she was Wells’s equal, refusing to be intimidated by the force of his opinion and backing up her own views with broad reading and a superb memory. “I had never met anything like her before,” he later recalled, “and I doubt if there ever was anything like her before. Or ever will be again.”14
Inevitably, the encounter blossomed into a full-scale romance. His fame mingled with her literary ambition. She appeared to soak up the glamour of the association with him, while not worrying about his reputation as – to use his words – “a promiscuous lover.” Soon, when they were alone together in the house on Church Row, a conversation about weighty affairs in front of his bookshelves turned to a kiss, and along with it the thralls of passion. Wells continued as he had from the start, captivated by the “curious mixture of maturity and infantilism about her.” To her mind, the kiss had implied a promise.15 He was still involved with Elizabeth von Arnim, however much they now quarrelled, and Rebecca did not want to risk alienating her mother and sisters, so the affair remained a furtive one, often conducted at the spacious flat Wells took after he finally left the Hampstead house. His London base was now St. James’s Court, a stone’s throw from the grounds of Buckingham Palace. There, the lovers could consort whenever they pleased, taking pleasure in quiet walks in the luxurious gardens of the majestic building’s large inner courtyard. It was at St. James’s Court in December 1913 that Rebecca West became pregnant with Wells’s child. It would be several months yet before she was to turn twenty-one.
The move to Little Easton had cured none of H.G.’s errant ways. Catherine knew this from the first and saw that his latest affair threatened to become just as scandalous, and more of a threat to her marriage, than the earlier one with Amber Reeves. Wells had arranged for Rebecca to live in a house at Braughing, a small village no more than a dozen miles from Dunmow, and he now spent much of his time there. But what could Catherine do? As Jane, she had thrown herself fully into domestic concerns, just like Marjorie in Marriage. H.G. had broached the possibility of giving up the rectory, but this time she had resisted strenuously.
This was Catherine speaking, and H.G. knew it. She would not move again. She was tired of his juvenile ways – the petulance, the waves of ennui that rolled over him so frequently, the sense he conveyed that even when home he longed to escape. So she had insisted on a long lease for the Old Rectory and a major transformation of the place. Jane would take care of all this: adding more bedrooms and bathrooms, modernizing the heating, and installing a large window overlooking the valley.
During the renovations Wells spent much of his time away. When he did write to her, it was to blame the upset of domestic routine for his discontent. “My irritability at home is due to the unsettled feeling due to rebuilding,” she read. “I do not think you understand what a torment it is to an impatient man to feel the phantom future home failing to realize itself. I hate things unfinished & out of place. I want things settled[.] I want a home to live in & have people into – people one can talk with. At present home is a noisy, unsympathetic, uninteresting muddle.”
So it was she who was to blame for his difficulty in settling down, was it? And of course it was also she who bore the responsibility for his other restlessness: “When I have been at the Rectory for a few days,” he went on, “I get into a state of irritability because of sexual exasperation … I want a healthy woman handy to steady my nerves & leave my mind free for real things. I love you very warmly, you are in so many things, bone of my bone, & flesh of my flesh & my making. I must keep you. I like your company … But the other thing is a physical necessity. That’s the real hitch.”16
This was their moment in Labrador, together but apart, settling things but resolving nothing, all the conditions set as usual from the vantage point of Wells’s own wants and needs. He would spare no expense to help her fix up the rectory; but he must also be allowed to live his triple life – in London with his circle, in different places with Rebecca, and at home whenever the mood suited him. Nothing less would keep him happy.
There would be few if any outward signs of Catherine in the remaining years of this marriage. A critical point had been reached in the twenty-year-old relationship. She could not withstand further assaults on her dignity, and she knew that some of their friends wondered how she had been able to take them. But they should have understood her better than this, for they were English and generally of good stock. They, above all, knew from birth that the best manner of confronting an indignity was to meet it with a politesse that disarmed and humbled the accuser. In this, Catherine’s greatest ally was Jane.
Discussing this situation, one of Wells’s biographies notes that Jane was able to cope with this latest instance of her husband’s gross misbehaviour “because ‘Catherine’ was not touched.”17 Catherine managed to maintain her dignity, and a presence, because she allowed her persona as Jane to emerge and take over. As Jane, she had other advantages that, as Catherine, she lacked. Her husband needed security as much as he needed sex, and Jane could provide that in spades. The Jane inside her would become the very model of domestic perfection he expected. Catherine knew that the more he carried on, the greater became his need for a safe and comfortable refuge, and Jane would ensure it was ready for him. There was a certain power in servitude.
Catherine was well aware that Jane brought domestic security for herself as well as for her husband. Catherine Wells sought a refuge within the inner recesses of this marriage, and Jane Wells could help ease the pain of the retreat. And the advantages in life made possible by H.G.’s inventive mind – wealth, comfortable surroundings, a wide and interesting social circle, holidays on the Continent – these were not to be discounted. All this and more would be lost should she ever leave this less than perfect marriage. As Catherine, she had other ways of alleviating the pain. Listening to Chopin helped, as did writing short stories and poems, often in secret.
In the years to come, Jane would prevail, but Catherine would remain intact. Jane would do everything she could to maintain her peace with this man and with herself. She would continue to help him with his work in whatever ways possible, and spend freely and fill with guests the place they had renamed Easton Glebe. Catherine, meanwhile, found other ways to express her loneliness and her longings.
Overnight, it seemed, it was August 1914 and war. The news had stunned Florence Deeks. It had all come so suddenly, over a holiday weekend. All of Toronto had been abuzz, and great crowds had gathered around the newspaper offices eager to find out what was happening. The Bloor Street Methodist Church that Sunday had been filled with Christians anxious to learn whether Great Britain would declare war, and she had seen in the men’s eyes that they fully approved of the minister’s insistence that every Christian’s duty was to serve the noble cause of God, King, and Empire.
Like other Canadians, Florence learned that England was at war with Germany when she opened the newspaper on the morning of Wednesday the 5th. Its editors seemed eager for Canadians to be part of the action, and two days later, when Prime Minister Robert Borden announced that the country had joined the effort in support of the Empire, everyone seemed ecstatic at the prospect of a good scrap with the Germans. Thousands had marched down Yonge Street with Union Jacks and drums, singing choruses of “Rule Britannia,” “God Save the King,” and “The Maple Leaf Forever,” afterwards scattering in groups looking for the nearest recruiting office.18
Florence had been at loose ends for the past year. The clubs to which she belonged kept her occupied – “beguiled the time,” as she put it – but she seemed simply to be drifting. What had she done with her life? What had she accomplished? A stint at teaching, some journalistic work, but what else? She recalled “the supreme elation” of the family back in the 1880s, when brother George had won the gold medal at Victoria College. Each member of her family had possessed “some righteous ambition,” but what was hers? It had always been to write a book, but as yet she had done nothing to realize her dream.19
One day, quite by chance, she ran across an acquaintance in the publishing industry and asked him about a subject that might be suitable for a short book. He was kind enough to give her a scrap of paper with four or five ideas on it, including one on women, but when she next looked she could not find it anywhere.20 She remembered, however, that one of the suggested subjects had been something like “women’s share in Canada’s development.” That was as good a subject as any to work on, so she gathered her resources and took herself to the public library. But the subject seemed intractable. She could scarcely find any material on the topic. Perhaps, she thought, she should write a short history of Canadian life and incorporate women’s work and influence into it. So far as she knew, history had recorded little of the life of women and the home, whether in Canada or elsewhere.
Back on Farnham, she broached the idea to her sisters. Annie was excited about the possibilities. “Yes,” she told Florence. But why think small? “What could be more fascinating than the whole story of mankind with its love episodes woven into the narrative? I know,” Annie said, “so far as I am concerned I should be delighted to have the romance of mankind in a nutshell.” Florence was intrigued by the thought. Love episodes. Points in history when the power of love showed through and made a difference. The romance of mankind. A new kind of history of the world. A history with women in it. A history where women mattered. The theme was wonderful.21 For the rest of the summer and well into the fall she began to think seriously about writing something along these lines.
By November of the first year of the Great War, men in khaki gave the city a truly autumnal hue, and lads in their teens paraded in ragged formations on the university grounds, mock rifles shouldered at every angle. Only a few weeks earlier, the first contingent of volunteers from across the country had left for England and the front. What had become of the brotherhood of man and the Biblical counsel to “love thy neighbour as thyself”?
North winds gathered force as they swept in off Avenue Road onto Farnham Avenue, bringing with them a draft from the fireplace and a chill Florence could not shake. The house was especially silent these days. Her sisters and mother seemed stricken with foreboding. What of George? Would he enlist? Would they let him, a man of fifty-five? Perhaps his engineering skills would be seen as essential to the war effort, but was this enough to keep him from the front? Night after night the sisters and the mother sat mute, bidding such thoughts away by force of will. Such notions brought bleak prospects, for them as for George.
Given such domestic circumstances, exactly what prompted Florence Deeks to go to the Toronto Public Library and commence work on a history of the world, a history with women in it, remains a matter of conjecture. It may have been Annie’s suggestion, turning over in Florence’s mind. Perhaps it was the war itself, its carnage all too evident by the late autumn of 1914. Or just possibly it was something else, something she read. Florence admired Flora MacDonald Denison and liked her writing; she may well have encountered a little pamphlet written by Denison for the Canadian Women’s Suffrage Association in the first months of the war. The title of the tract was War and Women.22
Reading the new polemic, Florence would for once have been disappointed. Denison’s argument was murky, her logic convoluted, and the tract raised as many questions as it answered. She talked much about the evolution of war but said little about love’s own evolution. “The Peace idea,” said Denison, “had been tried and not found wanting.” Then why, Florence may well have asked, was the world at war?
She would have been puzzled by the silences, the lack of background in the pamphlet. Denison asked whether altruists had “lived and worked and thought for nothing?” But she did not reflect historically on the matter. What were the actual origins of altruism, and why was it so easily sacrificed at the altar of war? When the suffragist leader stated, “It is only yesterday that a social conscience was born,” was she correct? How could this be, if the nurturing and protective instinct was part of a woman’s very nature and had presumably been so since the dawn of time? Was it true, as Denison claimed, that “the human, and especially the male, has thought in terms of combat and dominance through force”? The human? Women too? Surely not.
The world war spoke to the truth of this consequence of human evolution, but what of the redemptive power of love? Where was the mother, the woman, in all this? Denison’s answers took the form of assertion, not explanation. How little she actually said about women’s place in history! Much had been written about war; Florence knew that much. Men caused war. Men wrote history. Men were history. That was the problem. But what was the history of women? What was the past of love and the history of the bonds of affection and commitment and selflessness that knitted people together as mates, as families, as whole communities?
Love and War. This was surely the heart, the starting point, of any attempt to discover the origins of war and its relation to women. However Florence Deeks came to think along such lines, the fact is that she did. She resolved to learn much more about women, the family, and love, precisely because the world was at war.
A different kind of history, a history of the world, now began to take shape. Women and love were central to the past, but they remained exempt from it. Yet they constituted the warp of history, their lives intertwined with the weft of men and aggression, caught together in the web of humanity.
The day the war broke out, Wells was at home at Easton Glebe, taking in a local flower show with friends. A short distance away, his mistress gave birth to a son, to whom she gave the name Anthony West. During the months of Rebecca West’s pregnancy, the father-to-be continued in his split existence. He had assured Jane that the marriage was not threatened by his relationship with Rebecca, but he had also written to the expectant mother on several occasions that he was devoted entirely to her. He divided his time between the two women. Bound to their separate dwellings, they viewed each other with suspicion and more than a hint of animosity, particularly on Rebecca’s part. Wells tried his best to bring about a suspension of hostilities in these domestic skirmishes, separated by a no man’s land of only twelve miles.
A few months earlier, he had placed a book with Sir Frederick Macmillan about war. He called it The World Set Free, and it proved to be his most prophetic work, for in it he anticipated a future invasion of France by Germany, through Belgium. To an extent, the book marked something of a return to scientific fantasy. It posited a not too distant future in which the atom had been split, making atomic warfare a possibility – and a deterrent for combatants. But international economic collapse in 1956 would precipitate a nuclear holocaust. Wells’s portrait of the destruction of civilization and its structures allowed him to speculate about its reconstruction as a world-state unfettered by decaying institutions and ruled by enlightened and superior beings rather like himself.23
On August 4, 1914, however, the prophet was genuinely “taken by surprise” by the outbreak of hostilities. He took some comfort in the possibility that the war would take public attention away from his latest escapade and its bawling progeny. His campaign began in earnest with a widely circulated work called The War That Will End War – a tract whose title gave the twentieth century one of its most enduring phrases. Its title essay urged that everything possible be done to ensure that this war would be the last one. From the outset, Wells devoted his energy to clarifying the Allies’ war aims and creating the means of a settlement that would be a just one for all concerned. As summer faded into autumn, all his hatred of traditional patriotism vanished, and he became a mainstay of the jingoism of the newspapers controlled by Alfred Harmsworth (shortly to become Viscount Northcliffe), alienating him from his Liberal friends and acquaintances.
The private war of Mr. Wells was fought, however, on more fronts than this. Another was literary. In March and April 1914, Henry James had made public his view of the inferiority of Wells’s fiction in two essays published in the Times Literary Supplement. Wells was furious, and in June 1915 he exacted revenge in a novel called Boon, published by T. Fisher Unwin under the pseudonym “Reginald Bliss,” with Wells purportedly writing only the introduction. The ruse fooled no one. The book’s bitter satirical sketch entitled “Of Art, of Literature, of Mr. Henry James” mercilessly attacked the grand old man of Anglo-American letters. To sharpen his barb, Wells personally delivered a copy of the book to the Reform Club, where he knew it would find its way to James. He did not bother to enclose the customary covering note of greetings.
The calculated insult hurt James deeply and alienated many within the London literary community from Wells. That James was very ill and going blind was well known in those circles, and their anger at H.G. was fuelled by pride that James was in the process of renouncing his American citizenship in order to ally himself with the British cause.24
The domestic front was scarcely peaceful. While Jane occupied herself with Easton Glebe and the garden she tended so lovingly, Wells found his relationship with Rebecca growing tense. Rebecca had come to hate her situation, moving from one cramped cottage to another. It had not taken long for the tiny village of Braughing to learn her identity and her unenviable situation as an unmarried pregnant woman. She detested the contemptuous looks of villagers and servants, and could all but hear their gossip, so she made little effort to get along with any of them. Moreover, she resented the fact that Wells refused to leave his wife, that perfect but bloodless little factotum. But she did gain some satisfaction in working on an impudent but appreciative study of Henry James at the same time as Wells did his best to destroy the author’s reputation by writing Boon.25
After the birth of Anthony, it became clear that the relationship between Wells and West had reached an impasse. Both knew that he would not leave Jane, and Rebecca could not stand her role as a social outcast. Amber Reeves had solved her own problem with Wells by opting for a loveless marriage. For Rebecca, this was not an option. She was in love but confused. As her son grew, she found herself making concessions to family pressures and telling him she was “Aunty Panther.” Wells at first resisted the subterfuge but later continued it by giving the child the impression that, as “Mr. West,” he was a kind of concerned uncle.26 The experience scarred the boy for life.
Florence sat at the far end of “her” table. Like the others, it was a long one. The College Street branch of the Toronto Public Library had become her second home, and she loved it; loved the spacious reading room with its many large windows, and the rows of potted plants on the bookshelves below them. She loved the majestic Romanesque arches at the room’s ends and the intricacy of carved detail on the heavy wooden ceiling beams. She had even got used to the hard wooden chairs with the round backs and the spindles that dug into her spine.27 She knew each nook and cranny of this place and felt like one of its fixtures. She treasured the thought, for she belonged here. She liked being surrounded by other people, each in a private world, intensely occupied with the books in front of them. Finally she felt truly part of something, connected to a community of the curious, to people with intellectual purpose.
At first her work had been hard going, for she scarcely knew where to begin. She had studied history at the university under Professor Wrong, but she did not regard herself as by any means a real historian. Only four years older than herself, Wrong had nevertheless been an enthusiastic and engaging professor, if a little pompous. But he had been a good teacher of history. Through him, Florence had been introduced to the works of some of the major historical works of the nineteenth century, including Francis Parkman’s romantic narratives and John Richard Green’s comprehensive account of the progress of England in his Short History of the English People.28 Green’s work, in particular, had stuck with her because he had not been entirely preoccupied with politics and war.29 But there had been very few women, if any, in the books used by Professor Wrong, or for that matter in the lectures Wrong gave on European or colonial history.
Early in her research, she had discovered how little had been written about women, at least as revealed by the library’s card catalogues. Among the books she did find was one by Jane Johnstone Christie, called The Advance of Woman from the Earliest Times to the Present, published in 1912, and it pointed to further sources.30 She began reading books on Europe. This led to studies of the Middle East and Asia. Frustrated with this lack of focus and direction in her research, she decided to write her account of “woman’s work and influence” with the help of such published histories. She knew that her book would not be a work of original scholarship, but she did not intend it to be one.31 For her purposes, she did not need to document her sources, and she did not initially think to keep a list of those she consulted. She wanted to write a book that would be read by a wide audience, especially by women interested in learning about woman’s past. No footnotes were necessary. She intended to provide a synthesis of a subject that nowhere, to her knowledge, existed between two covers.32
The idea was certainly an audacious one. She knew she could write decent enough prose, and she had studied history at university, but she scarcely held an adequate command over the millennia of recorded human experience. “Before I could achieve my purpose,” she wrote later, “I had to work out for myself an outline of history.”33
In short, although she intended to use her own words and her own ideas in her book, she needed to gain an overview of the past as previous historians had conceived it. “The only short history of the world to be found,” she wrote, “was an old one written by Duruy about 1850.” The book that suited her purpose was Victor Duruy’s General History of the World, first published in English early in the twentieth century.34 Its 967 pages provided her with an account of the vast stretches of history she wanted to treat. For the later period, so did Green’s Short History, which she enjoyed revisiting. It pleased her that she was now using it for very different reasons than either Green or Wrong had ever had in mind.35
The public library was well stocked with works of history. They were almost always by men, and at first glance each book seemed concerned only with the lives and doings of men. But they helped increase her stock of general knowledge. She found a helpful essay by James Harvey Robinson on history in a volume called Source Book of Social Origins, and Chambers’ Encyclopedia filled many gaps. As her research progressed, it seemed constantly to regress to an earlier decade, an earlier century, an earlier age. She resolved to begin at the beginning – the very beginning – with accounts of the earliest humans by anthropologists and historians of the ancient world. Here she found herself thankful for Professor Wrong’s lectures on ethnology, and to Professor Daniel Wilson, Wrong’s predecessor, for making ethnology part of the history curriculum.
Eventually she found that if she took enough of these books from the shelves and examined them carefully enough, the occasional and offhand references to women were surprisingly suggestive. In this way, she combed the catalogues for further works, and the fruits of these, too, she incorporated into her ever-expanding “plan.”
A very serious game had begun – her private game, one that saw her ransack scholarly and general works of history, daring them to mention women and teasing the smallest bit of evidence about her own sex from the text, anything at all that spoke to woman’s place in history. To her delight, she even found more works specifically on women, such Guglielmo Ferrero’s The Women of the Caesars and Gidoro del Lungo’s The Women of Florence. She felt alive.
The peacefulness inside the library on College Street in the fall of 1916 belied the reality outside. The Great War, as people were now calling it, had been raging in Europe for two long years. Gone was the earlier enthusiasm for a few weeks of adventure on the continent. Battles such as those at Ypres in the spring a year earlier, where the Germans had used deadly gas, and at the Somme this summer and fall had done away with that. Everyone was shocked to learn that in the battle of the Somme alone there had been almost twenty-five thousand Canadian casualties and over a million from other countries. The mood in the streets outside the library was sombre, even sorrowful.36
In March 1916, Ontario’s premier, William Hearst, had said that the war had changed everything, and he was correct. The government and military had just warned that enlistment had fallen to dangerous levels, and that the horrific losses at the Somme had to be made up. There was open talk of conscription. Recruitment officers seemed to be everywhere – at concerts, in churches, and at meetings of associations of every type. Lady Aberdeen was a forceful voice in encouraging enlistment, as was Mrs. Pankhurst, who had recently completed a cross-Canada tour. The women at the art association, like so many others, had dropped their paintbrushes for knitting needles, and schoolchildren everywhere had been enlisted to do tasks like rolling bandages or sewing uniforms.37
Little doubt there were moments at her table in the library when Florence wondered whether she should put aside her history and do volunteer work for the Canadian Patriotic Fund or the Red Cross. But eventually she summoned the courage to put her first words to paper: “In the beginning!! There floated in the immensity of space a speck.”38
She had made good progress after penning those words early in the war; sixteen chapters and she had only reached the Renaissance. There was so much more to be done, yet she was pleased. The book was certainly about women in history, but it had become much more than this, almost as if it had a will of its own.
As she now saw history, from the beginning of human life women had been the constructive influence, taking care of the children, protecting and nurturing them while men went in search of food. Women had been responsible for the slow growth of the habit of staying in one place. Woman was “the architect and builder” of the first home; she also controlled the food supply. The violent and aggressive activities of men led them to acts of “selfish domination and destruction,” but these had been mitigated by the natural instincts of woman towards cooperation. Woman, not man, was the progenitor of communal life.39
It was woman who inaugurated art, initially by imitating “the forms and colorings of nature” and weaving twines and threads and sinews into ever more intricate and precise patterns. In this way, she laid the foundations for arithmetic and geometry, just as her use of plants as herbal remedies served as the basis for therapeutics. Woman, not necessity, was the mother of invention.40 Florence readily acknowledged that these ideas had not been her own.
One of Florence’s central themes was women’s struggle for independence. Egyptian women, for example, often possessed more wealth than their husbands. “Descent,” she wrote, “was in the female line, and property was still inherited by daughters instead of sons, men were not polygamous, nor was the wife the subject to her husband.”41
It was because relative equality existed between the sexes in Egypt and Babylon that they had achieved greatness as civilizations. Only later, when women became subject to capture and sale, and love was made secondary to male aggression, did they lose their independence. In this way, Florence argued, “as the covetous militarist hesitated at no depredation to gain a desired possession, crime increased and misery followed in proportion, and for this cause alone – the personal possession of property – untold crimes began to deluge the world with inconceivable miseries.” This was so whether she looked at the history of the Middle East, India, or China.42
For a long time, the women of Greece held positions of authority and influence. Had not five of the eight Greek deities been female and many Greek cities been named after women? Woman was also supreme among the Latins and especially the Etruscans. In ancient Rome, Florence had written, “descent was in the female line, woman had full freedom, husband and wife were friends and companions, and citizens were on a footing of equality.” But even within these civilizations, woman eventually became subject to the dictates of man. In Greece, woman lost the franchise and citizenship, and descent changed to the male line. This did not end woman’s influence, for “although the supremacy of might and of patriarchal authority was now established, the old habits still clung to the nation, and in many districts the old order continued to prevail, and woman remained the centre and inspiration of society.”43 Eventually, militarism prevailed and women became mere chattels, to be disposed of at will or whim. From the Greek god Dionysus came the idea of “the divinity of fatherhood.”
At the same time, however, Florence stressed the ways in which women resisted such subordination. She devoted attention to the free women of Athens and noted that within Rome there had existed “a kind of women’s club” consisting of members of the great families, women who demonstrated in the forum and other public places “to obtain laws and other provisions from the magistrates.” They persisted in the face of opposition and succeeded in acquiring a degree of freedom, Florence declared. In property relations, only the dower, not all of a woman’s possessions, became the property of her husband. The unmarried woman was also independent, “the lifelong male guardianship appointed by her father” passing away to such an extent that she was allowed to make a will.44
For Florence, the example of Greece provided the most striking illustration of “woman’s high position” at a certain stage of history; but it also demonstrated her consequent dethronement by forces that led to “war, slavery, massacre, internal strife and the final annihilation of the state taking the race down with it.” Even Greece proved unable to control “the demon of war.” The possibility of a civilization driven by love and beauty was lost, for the triumph of physical force led instead to “degeneracy and misery.”45
Even so, Florence continued to emphasize the beneficial influence of women, whether through the wife of Pontius Pilate or Mary the mother of Jesus. “Mary,” she wrote, “was keenly alive to the terrible wrongs under which her nation had so long suffered, and she at once beheld in her infant son the long-looked-for Messiah through whom God was to save the world – not by militarism but – by Love.” It was the women who were with Christ who first recognized his divinity and accepted his plan of salvation.46 The Christian church, however, served the cause of woman’s subjugation. During the early Middle Ages the different church councils removed woman from ministry and the altar, banned her from the diaconate, and forbade her to receive the Eucharist in her bare hands “because of her impurity, or to sing in church because of her inherent wickedness.” In 595 AD, the Council of Macon even discussed whether woman possessed a soul.47
One institution governed by woman persisted: the home. Italian matrons, exemplified by Portia, Livia, Antonia, and Agrippina, continued to be its strong protectors. The women of northern Europe, while not allowed to sit at the same table as their husbands, nevertheless turned the home into “a field of action” aimed at undermining “the dash and clash of militarism” and “the psychological dominance of ecclesiasticism, with its imposing but empty and deceptive ritualism.” It had been at the castle of Matilda of Canosse that Emperor Henry IV had met Pope Gregory VII, a meeting that eventually led to Henry’s capture of Rome and his appointment of the bishop of Ravenna as the antipope Clement III.48
In these and in many other ways, sitting day after day in the Toronto Public Library, Florence Deeks developed the main themes of her life’s work: the initial equality of woman and man at the dawn of time; her gradual subordination – physically, legally, and economically – to him; yet her continuing, beneficent influence on the course of history in the face of all odds. During the horrifying months of the slaughter on the Somme, Florence wrote about Dante, about the way Beatrice mourned Dante’s suffering on earth. It was Beatrice, his beloved, who awakened in him the awareness that he had strayed from his high ideals, and who drew his eyes once more towards Heaven. “Observe me well; I am, in sooth, I am Beatrice.”49
At Easton Glebe, Catherine was in her usual spot on a cool, late-August morning in 1916, in the white chair of cast-iron filigree. From where she sat in the garden, taking her tea, she could look out past the sprawling lawn towards the village and the hills beyond. The place was eerily quiet these days, the silence punctuated only by the chirping of finches and the occasional bellowing of cattle in the meadows below. At times she swore she could hear a distant, rolling thunder.
H.G. was in Flanders, touring the battlefields. Harmsworth had asked him to do so earlier in the year, but only in the summer had he accepted. Wells could not have found a worse – or for him was it a better? – time to have gone across the channel. A ferocious battle had been taking place along the Somme since the beginning of July, and the casualty lists were staggering. Like some kind of slow-growing malignancy, the war had penetrated all aspects of life in Britain. Everyone Catherine knew seemed to have lost someone. Dunmow seemed in an ongoing state of mourning now. Her heart went out to Cynthia Asquith, grieving over the loss of her youngest son, Yvo. Her husband’s friend Sir Ray Lankester, sitting in his London flat at the age of sixty-nine, had written her a letter in which he had worried himself silly about the possibility of Zeppelin raids.50 Arnold Bennett, the friend of her husband to whom she felt closest, scarcely came around these days, consumed as he was with war work at Wellington House, headquarters of the Ministry of Information, and for the Wounded Allies Relief Committee. Like the other literary lions of the day, whether Galsworthy or Conrad, Yeats or Masefield, Bennett had published little in a literary vein this year. Like the nation itself, they all seemed to have lost momentum, satisfied enough simply to survive into another day.
All, that is, except H.G. Wells. This rogue of hers had managed not only to carry on, but in his own way to flourish despite the demons in his life. His latest novel, Mr. Britling Sees It Through, was about to be released, and she was certain it would be a huge success. She remembered the aggressive nature of his early writings on the war, and how his tone had turned to despondency once the prospect of a lengthy war hit home and the long lists of war dead began to appear in local newspapers.
She picked up the letter that had arrived from him in the morning post and unfolded it. “Dear Mummy,” it began. She could feel his angry mood as she read his views of the French generals he had met. “I doubt if they will affect history very profoundly. They are all so sure … that it will be over in six or eight months … It’s an imbecile expedition.” He signed the letter “Poor bored Daddy,” but she knew he was anything but bored. The letter exuded an exasperation born of a sadness so deep it was almost too painful to bear. His infantile regression made him resemble nothing so much as a lost child traipsing around the battlefields of Europe.51
Perhaps Britling would help make up for the indifferent success of his last few books, once again refractions of H.G.’s life and affairs. In The Passionate Friends, published the year before the war, he had cast himself as Stephen Stratton, a man with a keen interest in the politics of Empire, and had explored the frustrations of his involvement with Rebecca West. Lady Jane, the object of the married protagonist’s obsessive attention, was a combination of West and Lady Warwick. Jane Wells had her own part to play, as Rachel, the self-sacrificing and supportive wife and mother. Later Rebecca West would describe Rachel in a review of the novel: she was “a phantom doormat.”52 By the novel’s end, Lady Jane is destroyed by the mutual jealousies and suspicions of her husband and her lover, and Stratton lives on in despair with his faithful and compliant wife, to whose position he gives no thought at all.53
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman (1914) had continued such themes. Ellen – who resembles the mother of Amber Reeves – suffers under an abusive husband who treats her like so much property. She chafes at her subjection and finds a measure of release through involvement with suffragette friends. Catherine Wells would have noticed that the real villain of the book was not the nasty Sir Isaac, who dies, but marriage and the bondage it entailed. The widowed Lady Harman is now free, and she expresses her liberation by refusing to marry her friend and possible suitor, Mr. Brumley – a character not unlike H.G. – who discovers that he is as guilty of jealousy as Sir Isaac had been.
True freedom and happiness, the two novels said, are found only outside matrimony and only in a world released from jealousy. The husbands in H.G.’s novels were often blackguards, but at the same time there was scarcely a single woman in them who did not ultimately cause a man’s ruin and prevent him from reaching his potential. The theme was getting time-worn, like Catherine’s marriage. As sales indicated, the reading public had grown tired of H.G.’s self-justifying revelations.
But Britling was different. Written in the midst of all his other war work, it captured the changing mood of Britain and the pain and confusion of the home front like no other novel of the day. In fact, Britling read like a social history of the past two years, from its lovingly painted details of life at Matching’s Easy (Easton Glebe by a truly Wellsian name) at the outset of the war to its anguished portrayal of a citizen and father who has suffered grievously and wants to understand its meaning. Boon had spoken of the war but had done so in a tone of mocking sarcasm. The liberal press had pilloried him, first for his war-mongering and anti-German views and then for the derision Wells heaped on others in Boon. Mr. Britling Sees It Through was bound to help them understand his anguish.
H.G. is Britling, and Britling is England – carrying on, somehow, in the face of catastrophe. Britling is a philanderer, all right, but above all he is human. He is in love, but with a son and with England. The book is also a poignant love song for a generation of lost youth, German as well as English.54 It begins with belligerent Mr. Britling wanting to arm the Boy Scouts and arrives at the recognition that the war had become “like any other of the mobbing, many-aimed cataclysms that have shattered empires and devastated the world; it is a war without point, a war that has lost its soul.” At its conclusion, words fail, and the reader is left only with the claim that “our sons … have shown us God” and the image of a sunrise. It is the story of a change of mind – in a man, in a people.55
Catherine’s mind drifted to this unfathomable man and to the front, and then she quietly folded her letter, reached for her teacup, and made her way back up to the house.
Mabel Deeks stood at the window in the late spring of 1917. She was worried about Florence, now heading east down Farnham to the Yonge Street streetcar. For two long years her older sister had left the house each weekday, and some Saturdays, for the public library on College Street. It must be taking a toll on her health although there were no obvious signs. At fifty, she should be relaxing more, but that had never been Florence’s way. Early each morning she set out, no matter the weather, lugging her canvas bookbag; each evening she returned at six, new books under her arm.
Every afternoon when Mabel returned after giving her piano lessons at the Toronto Academy of Music,56 she waited anxiously for her sister, for Florence’s historical work had brought new life to 140 Farnham. Florence’s enthusiasm often now overcame her natural reticence, and every night seemed to bring another interesting story from the past. Mabel and Annie could scarcely believe there was so much history to tell, so many stories about people they had never heard of. One evening it would be Pericles’s mistress – Aspasia, was it? The next, it might be the Roman matron Cornelia or Anne of Constantinople or the English Queen Matilda.
The growing pile of neat typescript on the dining room table testified to the importance of this history. The whole family had become interested in what Florence was doing. It made Mabel recall table talk back in Morrisburg about the Loyalists and their grandfather and Wellington. Her father had always taken a special interest in history.57 Even Mother and George now asked about Florence’s book, questioning her when she was not busy with her “plan.”
It had often been difficult to carry on much of a family conversation while George’s children were around. And what a handful they were: ten-year-old George – called by his middle name, Campbell – was reserved, like his father; but Douglas, eight, and little Edward, six, seemed cut from a bolder and less predictable pattern.58 Once the little ones were put to bed, however, conversation shifted from the news of the recent Canadian victory at Vimy, and they all turned to Florence and the tales she had gleaned from the past. It had been difficult for the others to keep a straight face when she told them about how Frederick William of Brandenburg – or was it Prussia? – would approach women he met in the streets, brandishing his cane and ordering them back into their houses and telling them that decent women should keep indoors. And they had been shocked when she informed them indignantly that George Jeffreys, chief justice under the Stuarts, known as the “hanging judge,” had sentenced women to be burned to death merely for giving food and shelter to the Puritan rebels.59 Florence had acquired such a stock of these stories!
Everyone marvelled at Florence’s single-minded dedication and the sacrifices she had made, even Helen, who usually remained detached from her sister-in-law’s enthusiasm. Shortly after she started going to the library Florence had given up almost all her other activities. She had resigned as recording secretary of the Toronto Women’s Liberal Club, much to Mother’s initial chagrin, and had even stopped going to the Women’s Art Association. The history consumed all her energy, and Mabel was amazed that, with the drain of war, her sister still had so much of it in reserve.
Sometimes Annie helped with the typing, for she had clerical skills. Usually, though, it was Florence at the Remington, pounding each day’s writing into presentable text.60 And when not doing that, she was often at the small desk in her upstairs bedroom, sorting through her piles of books and sheaves of notes, adding to her “plan.” It occurred to Mabel that her sister was engaged in her own private war – one of ideas and words fought against the attitudes and deeds of men through the ages. It tickled Mabel’s fancy: a little war fought in a public library and in a woman’s modest home on Farnham Avenue.