Eleanor Butler 1739–1829 and Sarah Ponsonby 1755–1831
‘Sisters in Love, a love allowed to climb,
Even on this earth, above the reach of Time!’
Thus did William Wordsworth, after a visit to their house in north Wales, describe the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’, two women who lived together for fifty years. Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby were born not far from each other in rural Ireland. Both boasted aristocratic connections: Butler was the daughter of an earl, while Ponsonby’s great-grandparents included an earl and a viscount. When she was a child, Butler’s Catholic family dispatched her to France for a convent education, but it was back in Ireland, in 1768, that she met Ponsonby, an orphan sent by her guardian to boarding school. The two became fast friends, visiting and writing to each other. As she matured, Ponsonby resisted suggestions that it was time for her to marry, and Butler refused to fulfil her mother’s desire that she become a nun.
The two women conceived a plan to elope to England, but were foiled by their families, who separated them and confined them to their homes. The persistence with which they continued to demand to live together eventually persuaded the elders to give in, perhaps fearing some greater scandal if they tried again to elope, or if Ponsonby’s claims to have suffered the unwanted advances of her guardian became public. Reluctantly, Butler’s brother provided a small annuity. Accompanied by a woman servant, Butler and Ponsonby left Ireland and finally settled in Llangollen. There they purchased a cottage, which they enlarged and remodelled into a mock-Gothic folly filled with old woodcarvings, thousands of books (in English, French, Italian and other languages), and keepsakes ranging from antique clocks to a letter from the king of France and a lock of Mary Queen of Scots’ hair, as well as the silver and glassware on which their joined initials were engraved.
The ladies lived a quiet life, reading, writing, playing music, doing embroidery and engaging in similarly genteel pursuits. A gardener, a footman and two female servants attended to their needs. Neighbours became accustomed to the sight of the two strolling about the village, often wearing long coats and hats described as mannish. Their situation and their literary interests made celebrities of them, and among a long list of personalities who came to call were Edmund Burke, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott and the duke of Wellington. Even if they were apparently occasionally annoyed by the procession of visitors, the ladies offered tea and conversation.
In 1790 the Llangollen couple reacted angrily to a newspaper article hinting that their relationship was perverse. On hearing the news, Burke wrote, ‘I trust that the piety, good sense, and fortitude that … make you the mark of envy in your retreat will enable you on recollection perfectly to despise the scandals’, consoling them by pointing out that ‘you suffer only by the baseness of the age you live in … the calumny for the virtues that entitle you to the esteem of all who know how to esteem honour, friendship, principle, and dignity of thinking’. Occasional rumours continued to circulate about the impropriety and debauchery of their attachment, but the ladies remained eminently respectable in their behaviour.
When Butler died, at the age of 90, the inscription that Ponsonby chose for her tombstone paid tribute to ‘an almost unequalled excellence of heart’, ‘manners worthy of her illustrious birth’ and ‘brilliant vivacity of mind’. ‘Her various perfections, crowned by the most pious and cheerful submission to the Divine will’, it continued, were most fully appreciated by God ‘and by her, of whom for more than fifty years they consisted in that happiness which, through our blessed Redeemer, she trusts will be renewed when this tomb shall have closed over its latest tenant’. On Ponsonby’s neighbouring gravestone, two years later, was written: ‘She did not long survive her beloved companion, Lady Eleanor Butler, with whom she had lived in this valley for more than half a century of uninterrupted friendship.’
During their lifetimes and afterwards, the ladies’ visitors and writers generally viewed them with sympathetic, if sometimes bemused, curiosity. An 1847 volume brought together some contemporary accounts that provide illustrations: a newspaper in 1796 noted that ‘Miss Butler and Miss Ponsonby are now retired from the society of men into the wilds of Llangollen’, and reported that one caller ‘found not in them the gravity, formality, and demureness of virgin recluses, but the ease of liveliness, and animated conversation of happy, cultivated, and polished minds’. An actor whose performance they attended in 1820 referred to them as ‘the dear inseparable inimitables’; at a dinner the ‘dear antediluvian darlings’ arrived in ‘manified [sic] dress, with the Croix de St. Louis, and other orders, and myriads of large brooches, with stones large enough for snuff-boxes, stuck in their starched neckcloths!’. (Dressing up, and pinning on would-be decorations, seems to have been a hobby.) A gentleman who had visited in the company of Sir Walter Scott described the situation of the women ‘who having been one or both crossed in love, forswore all dreams of matrimony in the heyday of youth, beauty, and fashion, and selected this charming spot for the repose of their now time-honoured virginity’. A German prince who had met ‘the most celebrated virgins in Europe’ when he passed through Wales also reflected on the peculiar life of women who ‘took it in their heads to hate men, to love only each other’. For one Englishwoman, the hermits (as she called them) ‘devoted their long lives so romantically to friendship, celibacy, and the knitting of blue stockings’. A French woman tourist saw in them the ‘model of perfect friendship since their early life’, as ‘they had no difficulty to persuade themselves that heaven had formed them for each other’. Anne Lister, a contemporary whose diaries record her ardent lesbian relationships, said of their union: ‘I cannot help thinking that surely it was not Platonic.’ Butler and Ponsonby referred to each other simply as ‘my better half’, ‘my sweet love’, and ‘my beloved’.
Present-day historians such as Martha Vicinus view Butler and Ponsonby as brave and learned women who challenged the expectations of their families and of society. Together they epitomized the ‘romantic friendship’: the type of partnership – often called a ‘Boston marriage’ in the United States – that women sometimes formed in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It would be unreasonable to assume that erotic desires and gestures were not part of some of these unions.
A contemporary of the Ladies of Llangollen, Anne Lister was one of the most active lesbians of the early 19th century. The daughter of a Yorkshire doctor, she recorded her sexual desires and encounters in a numeric, algebraic and Greek code she devised for secret sections of a 4-million-word diary. She also adopted a vocabulary for her sexual notations: ‘kiss’ for orgasm, ‘connection with the ladies’ for lesbianism, and ‘going to Italy’ for sexual relations accompanied by full commitment.
Lister’s romantic and sexual liaisons have the makings of a novel, and Leila Rupp, in a study of lesbians in history, calls her a ‘female rake’. Lister had her first lesbian experience, with a half-Indian fellow student, at her boarding school. At the age of 19, she began an affair with Isabella (‘Tib’) Norcliffe, with whom she enjoyed several trips to Italy. In 1812, through Norcliffe (whom she would jettison two years later), Lister met the woman who would be the love of her life, Marianna Belcombe, one of five sisters and the daughter of a doctor. Four years later, for financial and family reasons, Marianna married an ageing widower named Charles Lawton, though the women did not intend this to be the end of their relationship. Indeed, Marianna presented the ring that her fiancé had given her to Lister, who replaced it with one on which she had her initials engraved. The two women continued to see each other, though they were pained by the separation that matrimony brought. Marianna’s husband then discovered a letter from Lister to his wife musing on how they could live on Lawton’s inheritance when he died. He barred his house to his wife’s friend. Later he relented, and the women were able to keep regular company, with Lister writing of the women’s union as a true marriage; their intimate encounters were apparently common knowledge.
Lister’s attentions, after a time, wandered. She took up again, erotically, with Norcliffe. But at a women’s country weekend, attended by Belcombe’s sisters Anne and Harriet, other possibilities occurred. Within a short time, Lister had seduced Anne, as she related: ‘Talking … but then got more loving. Kissed her, told her I had a pain in my knees – my expression to her for desire – & saw plainly she likes me & would yield again, without much difficulty, to opportunity & importun[ity]’. Several days later, she was flirting with Harriet, and may have had some sort of sexual relations with her as well.
Portrait of Anne Lister by Joshua Horner, 1830 (Calderdale Museums, Yorkshire)
In 1824, now financially secure because of her effective management of the family’s estates near Halifax, on which she had opened a profitable colliery, Lister went to Paris. In the pension where she lodged, she met and began an affair with another Englishwoman, Maria Barlow, who would refer to herself as both Lister’s ‘husband’ and her ‘mistress’. They rented an apartment together, and for several years Lister commuted between her two partners, Barlow in France and Marianna Belcombe in England. On one occasion, Lister even introduced the two women to each other. Barlow liked the mannish persona Lister affected (which Belcombe did not), and even considered the possibility of their being married, with Lister cross-dressing as the bridegroom. Lister and Belcombe, meanwhile, continued to wear each other’s rings, and in 1825 they carried out another private partnership ceremony: ‘Marianna put me on a new watch riband & then cut the hair from her queer [genitals] & I that from mine, which she put each into the little lockets we got at Bright’s this morning, twelve shillings each, for us always to wear under our clothes in mutual remembrance. We both of us kissed each bit of hair before it was put into the locket.’
Lister persisted with her dual relationships, and her recurrent flirtations with Norcliffe and the other Belcombe sisters, but she also had an affair with a French noblewoman during her stay in Paris. In 1832 she fell in love with yet another woman, a widowed heiress (her wealth a not inconsequential attraction) who was a neighbour in Halifax, where Lister lived at her family seat, Shibden Hall. Anne Walker soon moved in. They swore vows of love on a Bible, exchanged rings and, a day after having sex, took Holy Communion together at the parish church and rewrote their wills to each other’s benefit.
Their life together was somewhat troubled by Walker’s melancholy and depression; Lister sent her to none other than Belcombe’s brother, a doctor, for treatment. The two women occasionally travelled, and Lister was the first woman to scale several high peaks in the Pyrenees. It was on another journey, to the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia, that Lister died of a fever. Walker returned to England with Lister’s embalmed remains, which were buried at her local church in Halifax. Walker ended her days in a mental asylum.
Lister’s life, and her various sexual engagements, are particularly revealing. For Martha Vicinus, a historian of 19th-century Britain, Lister’s story says something important about women’s sexual desire (and Lister’s was clearly strong) as well as their yearnings for friendship. It addresses questions of gender, in terms of Lister’s self-modelling as mannish and the way she often played a more stereotypically masculine role in sexual assertiveness, ambition and business dealings. The ceremonies that Lister performed with her partners replicated the rituals of a wedding, and Lister thought of herself, in her unions with Belcombe and Walker, as being united in marriage, though obviously not monogamously. The rounds of flirtation and bed-hopping chronicle the homosocial environment (even in its international dimensions) of women who loved women. For Anna Clark and Jennifer Frangoes, Lister in her life and diaries was not only living a lesbian life, but defining a lesbian identity.
‘I love and only love the fairer sex,’ said Lister, an affirmation of her desires and her sexual identification. Lister – ‘Fred’, as lovers called her, or ‘Gentleman Jack’ to her Yorkshire neighbours – has been called the first modern lesbian, and in 2010 formed the subject of a television documentary and a dramatization of her diaries. They provide a different perspective on the Regency England of Jane Austen, and bring to public view an important chapter in the history of lesbian lives.
The Gore-Booths were Anglo-Irish gentry, with landholdings of 25,000 acres and a stately home, Lissadell, in County Sligo. Eva’s father, the Eton-educated fifth baronet, managed the family estate (earning respect for his humane treatment of the peasants who farmed his lands) and served as chairman of the local railway. He also took part in four expeditions to the Arctic, which involved a mixture of hunting, fishing, natural history, navigation, and even a search for an explorer lost at sea. Eva’s mother was a cultivated gentlewoman with aristocratic connections.
Educated at home, Gore-Booth learned French, German, Latin and Greek from a governess. As a young woman, she was presented at court to Queen Victoria. She travelled with her father to America and the West Indies in 1894, and the following year attended the Wagner festival in Bayreuth. Figures of the Irish cultural renaissance came to dine at Lissadell, including William Butler Yeats, who composed a poem about Eva and her sister. Since she suffered from periods of illness, family and doctors hoped that a trip to the warmth of Italy would help restore her health. The journey would change her life.
In Italy Gore-Booth met another woman, Esther Roper. Roper was born in Cheshire in 1868, and her parents served as missionaries in Africa. She became Gore-Booth’s life partner, and they remained together for some thirty years, until Gore-Booth’s death. It was Roper who sparked Gore-Booth’s interest in the social question, having worked for the trade unions and campaigned in city slums. The two women soon moved in together in Manchester – whose industrial grittiness made a dramatic change from leafy Lissadell – and devoted themselves to social activism. They became prominent figures in the Manchester University Settlement, an institution that provided education and welfare for impoverished workers. The trade unions were a particular focus, especially those that represented women workers both in the local textile industry and elsewhere. In this context it was perhaps natural that the campaign for women’s suffrage should attract their efforts, and Roper became secretary of the Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage. In their collaborative work Roper favoured a behind-the-scenes position, organizing meetings, petitions and publications, while Gore-Booth played a more public role. The Irishwoman earned accolades for her efforts with working-class women – lecturing, setting up a theatre troupe, and working for the rights of barmaids, florists’ assistants and ‘pit-brow’ lasses in the mines.
In 1913, partly because of Gore-Booth’s health, the couple moved to London. Gore-Booth was now a published poet, writing volumes that were well received as exemplars of the new Irish poetry. She published on other subjects as well, including a study of the Gospels based on her reading of the Greek-language texts. In addition to the Christian scriptures, Gore-Booth was attracted to theosophy, the esoteric religion that combined the ‘wisdom of the East’ with occult practices. Among her writings – ten books of poetry and seven plays – are several collections of spiritual essays.
During the First World War, Gore-Booth and Roper joined the pacifist movement, campaigning on behalf of conscientious objectors. They were also drawn into the Irish nationalist movement, mostly on account of Gore-Booth’s sister Constance, who played a key role. Constance Markievicz had helped found the nationalist Sinn Féin organization in 1908, as well as the first nationalist journal for women, the Irish Neutrality League, and the Irish Workers’ Cooperation Society. Unlike her pacifist sister, Markievicz favoured an armed fight for Irish independence – often wearing military uniforms – and was arrested on numerous occasions. She took an active part in the Easter Rising of 1916, commanding nationalist forces on St Stephen’s Green in Dublin. Arrested yet again, she was convicted and sentenced to death – a sentence that was commuted to penal servitude only because she was a woman. Released in an amnesty in 1917, Markievicz was soon rearrested for participation in Sir Roger Casement’s plot to secure German support for the Irish cause.
Gore-Booth and Roper travelled to Dublin to visit Markievicz in prison and undertook efforts to secure her release. Later they tried also to gain a pardon for Casement, who had been condemned to death for treason (Gore-Booth even secured an audience with the king to plead for his life). The refusal of a reprieve was assured when Casement’s diaries, detailing his energetic homosexual life, were handed to the authorities. When Casement was hanged, Gore-Booth and Roper were among supporters who fell to their knees in prayer outside the prison, later setting up a League for the Abolition of Capital Punishment.
Portrait of Eva Gore-Booth by her sister, Constance Markievicz,undated (Lissadell Collection, Sligo)
Another interest for Gore-Booth and Roper was gender politics. In 1916, along with three others, they founded and edited a journal called Urania, which continued until 1940. The masthead of the eighty-four issues proclaimed: ‘Urania denotes the company of those who are firmly determined to ignore the dual organisation [into male and female] of humanity in all its manifestations. They are convinced that this duality has resulted in the formation of the two warped and imperfect types. They are further convinced that in order to get rid of this state of things no measures of “emancipation” or “equality” will suffice, which do not begin by a complete refusal to recognise or tolerate the duality itself. If the world is to see sweetness and independence combined in the same individual, all recognition of that duality must be given up.’
Urania thus called for abolition of gender differences. ‘Sex’, declared Gore-Booth (a word that the historian Sonja Tiernan interprets as ‘gender’, a term not current until the 1960s), ‘is an accident’. The radical idea of Urania was that male and female must be collapsed into one. The editors strongly opposed heterosexual marriage and promoted couples’ refusal to have children. Instead, they identified companionable and egalitarian partnerships, of the sort embodied by Gore-Booth and Roper, as the model for a future society free of distinctions between the sexes.
Despite the openness of Gore-Booth and Roper’s relationship and their advocacy of a genderless social order, the sexual nature of their lives and politics, and the significance of Urania, have been downplayed. The Dictionary of Irish Biography, for instance, refers only to a ‘life-long friendship’ between the women. Gifford Lewis’s biography of Gore-Booth is at pains to avoid any suggestion of an erotic, or even a romantic, union, and stresses the mystical bent of Gore-Booth’s writing rather than its sexual radicalism. Sonja Tiernan’s research is now restoring these dimensions to the women’s lives and writings.
Gore-Booth died of cancer in 1926; Roper survived her by twelve years. They are buried together in a London cemetery.
Sylvia Townsend Warner 1893–1978
In 1930, the up-and-coming writer Sylvia Townsend Warner met Valentine Ackland, by happenstance, in a village in Dorset. The two women did not immediately hit it off, but when Warner decided to buy a cottage in the village she asked Ackland if she would mind the house while she was away. Before long the women became lovers, and would remain together for almost forty years.
Warner’s father had taught history at Harrow, one of England’s grandest schools, and it was from him and his fellow schoolmasters that she received her education. Her real passion was for music, which she would have studied in Vienna had the First World War not thwarted her plans. In the event, she served on the editorial board of a ten-volume series of Tudor church music between 1923 and 1929. Small, handsome and bespectacled, she had an early and serious affair with Percy Buck, an organist and noted musicologist, but otherwise was attracted to women.
The convent-educated Ackland had been married by the time she was 19, although the marriage was annulled a year later for lack of consummation (her husband was homosexual). She was immensely tall and slender, and often dressed in men’s clothing; her choice of the name ‘Valentine’ over her Christian names (Mary Kathleen) highlighted her ambiguous nature.
By the time she and Ackland met, Warner had published several volumes of poetry and a novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), featuring a spinster who becomes a witch. She followed it up with a stream of short stories (mostly destined for The New Yorker) and six other novels notable for the variety of their themes, some of them homosexual or lesbian. Her second novel, Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927), set on a South Pacific island, tells the story of a clergyman who falls in love with his sole convert, a robust, nutmeg-coloured lad. The Reverend Fortune learns that he cannot, and should not, try to impart ‘civilisation’ to the ‘natives’ and loses his own faith, but sees, too, that a future with Lueli, his ‘maggot’ (meaning ‘whimsical fancy’) cannot be realized.
A later novel, Summer Will Show (1936), portrays a lesbian romance set in England and France. Sophia Willoughby jettisons her philandering husband and goes to Paris, where she meets Minna, a Jewish performer, salonnière, rebel, and her husband’s sometime mistress. Minna tells her that she has run away:
‘But what have I run away from?’
‘From sitting bored among the tyrants. From Sunday Schools, and
cold-hearted respectability, and hypocrisy, and prison.’
‘And domesticity,’ she added.
The two women begin a passionate affair, and Sophia declares that she has never before known such happiness. As the novel advances, events draw Sophia and Minna dramatically into the revolutionary tumult of 1848.
Ackland, too, was a writer and a poet, although relatively few of her verses were published during her lifetime. Lesbian love appears in her work as well, and in an experimental joint work with Warner, Whether a Dove or a Seagull (1933), to which they both contributed poems (none was individually signed). Recently issued collections of Ackland’s poems and the reissue of Warner’s novels have allowed a rediscovery of their works.
In addition to their literary collaboration, Warner and Ackland were jointly involved in other public activities. Concerned about the direction of European politics in the early 1930s, they signed up to the British Communist Party and contributed articles to its journals, but their enthusiasm eventually faded. They twice journeyed to Spain during the Civil War to take part in a conference of writers and to express support for the Republicans, and they also participated in a leftist writers’ congress in New York.
The letters between Warner and Ackland, published with a commentary by Warner after her partner’s death, form a touching chronicle of what they termed their ‘marriage’. They wrote frequently when they were separated (they were often away looking after their ageing mothers), and sometimes even penned notes to each other when they stayed together at their house in East Chaldon. The letters speak of quotidian matters – their various cats and dogs, the garden, visitors, food – but also of intense love and sexual pleasures. Early in their romance, Ackland teasingly wrote, ‘You must desire the pleasures I am devising for you,’ and Warner certainly did so. She recounted: ‘When she [Ackland] came to London’ – where Warner was working – ‘I reversed the sun. My day began when I went to spend the night with her … The nights were so ample that there was even time to fall briefly asleep in them.’ The letters to ‘my most dear love’ recorded their deepening commitment, joy and oneness – ‘we are one flesh, one spirit’.
The relationship was not completely untroubled. Warner felt monogamous, but Ackland sometimes strayed into extramarital liaisons. ‘She was so skilled in love that I never expected her to forego love-adventures. Each while it lasted (they were brief) was vehement and sincere,’ Warner recalled. In 1937, however, Ackland fell in love with Elizabeth Wade White, a wealthy American visitor to England. With remarkable outer equanimity, Warner let White stay in their house and share a bed with Ackland; she even once agreed to vacate their home for a month so that the two could spend time together. Remorseful, but expressing her love for both women, Ackland separated from White (though the affair would be rekindled a decade later). Her love was torn between the two, but her loyalty to Warner was never in doubt.
Once Ackland’s affair with White had finally concluded, she and Ackland drew even closer together. Their last decades were troubled only by Ackland’s problems with alcohol, and by her losing, regaining and relosing her Catholic faith, a religious interest that Warner did not share.
The two women continued to exchange letters filled with the same endearing tone and pledges of love that marked their early correspondence. ‘I love you with a most true, most married love: that I feel as I have done always, since we first lay together, a deep and absolute responsibility for you – which was my greatest joy and happiness,’ wrote Ackland in 1956. In 1968, as she lay dying of breast cancer, she summed up her sentiments: ‘There is indeed nothing at all but pure love. Not less pure because it is trimmed with boundless gratitude, the deepest and most ardent admiration[,] respect and delight in you … I have, to my capacity, stood with you.’ Thinking forward to life without her partner and referring to herself by an affectionate nickname Ackland had given her, Warner promised to ‘be sensible, take care of myself … eat an orange a day, and take care of your possession, your Tib’. She concluded: ‘Never has any woman been so well and truly loved as I.’ Warner lived for nine years after Ackland’s death, and their ashes are interred together in the graveyard at East Chaldon.
The primary subject for Claude Cahun’s photography was her own image – an infinitely changing, theatrically projected and obsessively observed visual persona. In perhaps her most famous self-portrait, she stands in front of a mirror, sporting closely cropped hair and wearing a chequerboard coat, and her handsome face looks out in a doubled view to the spectator.
In other shots she appears lying on a bed, Medusa-like, with her hair – long and unruly on this occasion – spread out behind her, or as a prim schoolgirl with neatly waved coiffure, sitting and reading a book. Sometimes she is dressed as a harlequin, the fringes of her hair arranged in jaunty curls on her forehead. Elsewhere, her head completely shaved, she sits in the cross-legged pose of a Buddhist monk. In another work, she is dressed in a bulky sweater, her head covered by a sailor-type cap, and she stands with her hands in her trouser pockets against a silk backdrop. One photo shows her dressed in a vampishly modernist dress and what can only be described as an extraterrestrial headdress. More surrealistically, she takes a picture of herself with her head – her hair pulled tightly back – enclosed in a glass dome on a tabletop. There are images of her wearing glasses or goggles, hair dyed appropriately. And there is a self-portrait as a much older woman, standing in a garden, her hair enclosed in a demure scarf.
Cahun was born Lucy Mathilde Renée Schwob in Nantes in 1894, into a prosperous and literary Jewish family. Her father was the proprietor of a newspaper, her great-uncle the head of a grand Paris library, and an uncle a novelist and co-founder of one of France’s most innovative cultural journals. Growing up in the fin-de-siècle in such a milieu meant a certain familiarity with avant-garde artistic currents, but it also meant exposure to the anti-Semitism catalysed by the Dreyfus Affair. The 12-year-old Schwob, whose mother suffered from psychological illness, was sent to school in England for two years to insulate her from exposure.
A few years after her return to Nantes, in 1909 Schwob met Suzanne Alberte Eugénie Malherbe, a fine-arts student two years her junior, whose father was a professor of medicine and member of the Nantes city council. The two became intimate friends, and at some point lovers; they began living with each other in 1917, and stayed together for the rest of their lives.
Claude Cahun (as Schwob now called herself) and Malherbe (who assumed the name Marcel Moore for her work as an artist and illustrator) made a formidable couple. They set themselves up in Paris, where Cahun studied letters at the Sorbonne, and eventually they settled in Montparnasse, at that time one of the world’s major artistic centres. In the 1930s they mixed with Surrealists such as André Breton (who became Cahun’s mentor), Georges Bataille, Henri Michaux and the homosexual René Crevel, with whom Cahun had a particularly affectionate friendship. Cahun became the most prominent woman in the cliquishly male Surrealist circle, and helped to organize an early Surrealist exhibition in London. While in Paris, Cahun occasionally went on stage, playing several roles with experimental, anti-naturalist theatre troupes. She belonged to the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, and signed a declaration ‘Against Fascism and Against French Imperialism’. She also wrote in support of a pioneering homosexual journal, Inversions, and translated work by the sexologist Havelock Ellis into French.
Exhausted by life in Paris, and concerned about Cahun’s delicate health, in 1937 Malherbe and Cahun moved to the Channel island of Jersey, where they had spent several summers. There they lived as two sisters – indeed, by this time Cahun’s widowed father had married Malherbe’s widowed mother. The two were living in Jersey when the Second World War began, and they remained, refusing to flee to England. The Channel Islands were the only part of Britain to be occupied by the Nazis, and Cahun and Malherbe, at great risk, took part in the Resistance. They listened, illegally, to BBC broadcasts, and on tiny sheets of paper Cahun typed out news and anti-war messages that Malherbe then illustrated. They left the flyers in restaurants, on cars, or in other places where German soldiers would find them. Eventually the women were discovered; they were arrested and sent to a military prison while the Gestapo ransacked their house. A German court sentenced the women to death, and only a stay of execution, followed by the Allied liberation, saved them.
Cahun and Malherbe formed a highly creative partnership, appearing in each other’s works. In 1919 Malherbe drew the illustrations for Cahun’s Vues et visions, a remarkable collection of essays and images that touch, in part, on same-sex attraction in antiquity and modern times. They later collaborated on photomontages for Cahun’s Aveux non avenus (sometimes known in English as ‘Cancelled confessions’), published in 1930.
Cahun’s work plays with perspective, makes use of props such as masks and mirrors, employs the techniques of collage and assemblage, juxtaposes curious objects, and overlays multiple exposures. But alongside the more Surrealist imagery, her photographs encompass portraits of the couple’s friends and colleagues, and of their cat. Her writings include Héroïnes – a collection of witty essays on prominent women in history and literature. Ulysses’ wife, Penelope, is a tease; Cinderella is the desired object of a foot fetishist; the biblical Judith, who beheaded Holofernes, is a sadist; and Delilah – famous for shearing the hair of the strongman Samson – takes revenge on the High Priest, ‘the natural enemy of woman. On him will I avenge all my sisters.’ The Virgin Mary, happily rid of her virginity, is a proud but petulant mother who feels that she is misunderstood by all. Sappho jokes that all women chase her and try to bed her, and that since she wears a short chiton she has become the ‘arbiter of lesbian elegance’ – though she harbours thoughts about having an affair with a man and bearing a child.
After the end of the war, the two women continued to live on Jersey. Cahun died in 1954; Malherbe survived until 1972. They are buried on the island, in St Brelade’s cemetery, where their grave is marked with their names and with two Stars of David.
Cahun was playful, provocative and subversive, interested above all in representation and performance. She was a manipulator of history and image, and shifted the construction of gender and sexual stereotypes. For these reasons her work, and that of her partner, have been rediscovered as a herald of postmodernism. For their creativity, for their lives as a lesbian couple, and for their heroic resistance against the Germans, they deserve to be celebrated as remarkable women.
The singer Suzy Solidor was born Suzanne Marion in a village near Saint-Malo, Brittany. Her surname was that of her unmarried mother, who worked as a chambermaid to the Surcouf family, one of whose sons had fathered the child. The Surcoufs were of grand Breton lineage, tracing their fortune back to explorers and corsairs. Once she had moved to Paris, Suzy chose a stage name, Solidor, from a 14th-century tower in her home town.
Solidor had a hard and poor childhood, but the First World War provided an opportunity to leave school and volunteer as an ambulance driver and mechanic on the home front. After the war, she hoped to become a model in the capital: she possessed a slender figure, height, blonde hair, angular good looks and an androgynous style that were much in favour in the années folles. That ambition changed when she encountered Yvonne de Bremond d’Ars (like Solidor the illegitimate daughter of a nobleman), one of Paris’s most important antique dealers and the author of several books on antique collecting. Solidor became Bremond d’Ars’s protégée and lover, remaining with her for eleven years.
According to Solidor, it was Bremond d’Ars who turned the Breton peasant into a stylish Parisienne. Solidor began to move in celebrity circles on account of her partner’s connections and her own charms. The 1920s saw the triumph of the boyish girl – a type represented by Victor Margueritte’s novel La Garçonne (1922) and portrayed by Solidor in a 1935 film adaptation. A bobbed hairstyle, form-fitting dresses, long cigarettes and fast cars were the accoutrements of the liberated young woman, and Solidor fitted the bill perfectly. Among those whose attention she attracted were artists: called the ‘most painted woman in Paris’, she sat for 225 portraits, including ones by Foujita, Cocteau, Van Dongen and the lesbian Tamara de Lempicka. Lempicka’s image of Solidor – her hair a blond helmet, one breast exposed, an arm dramatically raised and her torso posed against a Cubist cityscape – captures her spirit.
Bremond d’Ars was a possessive partner, but Solidor’s sexual and romantic interests were not exclusive. An affair with Maurice Barbezat led to an acrimonious break between the two women, who never saw each other again. Solidor’s lover helped set her up in her own antique business on the Left Bank, and remained a close friend after their ardour had cooled. Solidor soon had another woman lover, Daisy Bartholoni, whose marriage of convenience to a gay man gave her the title of Baroness Vaufreland.
Solidor had occasionally entertained friends by singing and reciting poems, and in 1932 she took the step of opening a cabaret. Located in the Rue Sainte-Anne (coincidentally, the centre of Paris gay life in the 1960s) and lined with her rapidly multiplying portraits, La Vie Parisienne became a popular nightspot, frequented by a crowd of lesbians, artists and bohemians over whom Solidor presided as host and entertainer.
As well as holding her own cabaret, Solidor sang at other venues, was an early radio performer, appeared in several films, and was chosen for an experimental television programme. With her substantial earnings, she bought a house in Brittany and rented smart apartments in Paris. She pursued numerous lesbian affairs, though she never entirely abandoned Bartholoni.
In the 1930s Solidor became the lover of Jean Mermoz. The dashing aviator had earned his wings in the French Air Force in Syria in the 1920s, and a pioneering transatlantic voyage in 1930, from Senegal to Brazil, had turned him into a hero. Mermoz and Solidor made a glamorous couple, but their romance came to a heart-breaking end when Mermoz’s plane was lost over the Atlantic in 1936. Solidor took refuge in her women friends, the cabaret, and a new interest in writing: she published several novels and volumes of stories, which often featured sexually ambiguous characters.
Solidor’s songs, delivered with impeccable diction in a husky voice, sometimes bespoke her Breton origins. ‘Les Filles de Saint-Malo’ and ‘La Belle d’Ouessant’ evoked port cities, sailors and their women. Solidor also sang about love between women: ‘I want every woman / From her heels to her hair / … Under her heavy skirts / My unquiet dreams / Slip a sly kiss / Onto her naked skin…’. In another song, entitled ‘Ouvre’, she sang: ‘Open your eyes, wake up … Open your legs, take my flanks / Into these white and smooth curves / Open your two trembling knees / Open your thighs’ – perhaps the most risqué evocation of lesbian sex in the repertoire. Although women often performed songs as if they were men singing to women, the combination of such lyrics and Solidor’s personal proclivities no doubt gave a particular frisson to lesbians who heard her renditions. A worldy audience, among whom gay singers and their so-called chansons interlopes (‘illicit songs’) were in favour, applauded her performances and easily accommodated her loves. As the historian Tirza True Latimer has suggested, Solidor brought lesbianism out of refined and avant-garde Sapphic circles into popular culture, from the intellectuals’ salon to the cabaret.
One piece of music for which Solidor became particularly famous was a French version of the German torch song ‘Lili Marleen’, which she sang even after Paris had come under Nazi occupation in 1940. She had made several tours to Germany and continued to mix with Germans, even once performing at a reception for the Nazi ambassador to Vichy France. In 1943 the Germans closed her cabaret for ten days because of a song that seemed to voice opposition to German rule, but in the eyes of the Free French Solidor’s reputation had nevertheless been damaged. During the postwar purge of collaborators, Solidor – despite testimony that she had covertly supported the Resistance – was formally disgraced and forbidden to perform for a year.
Effectively banished from the Paris stage, Solidor went on a successful tour to New York and Montreal. By the time she returned, in 1949, she was permitted to open a new cabaret, which operated until 1958, even as musical tastes turned away from the tradition of the chanteuse. She then moved to Cagnes-sur-Mer, accompanied by a cohort of women friends, and started a cabaret where nostalgia for the old songs blended with the glitz of the Côte-d’Azur.
Solidor died in 1983. Three years later came the death of Daisy Bartholoni, who was living in Paris; following Solidor’s wishes, her remains were buried next to Solidor’s in the Mediterranean village where the singer had made her home. Solidor had donated the many portraits made of her to a museum in Cagnes. A compilation of Solidor’s recordings, including songs from the remarkable Paris Lesbien album, appeared a quarter-century after her death.
Annemarie Schwarzenbach 1908–1942
Adventurer, reporter, novelist, poet, anti-fascist, heiress, drug addict – many words describe Annemarie Schwarzenbach. She was born in 1908 into one of the wealthiest families in Switzerland; her father was a silk manufacturer, her mother the daughter of a general. As a child she acquired the expected social graces – including musical skills good enough to make her a concert pianist – and joined the Wandervögel movement of nature-lovers, but at school she came into conflict for her unruliness and her crushes on fellow pupils and women teachers. Schwarzenbach continued her education at the Sorbonne and the University of Zurich, where she wrote a doctoral thesis on the medieval history of the Engadine region and produced her first novel. With money, connections, education, creative talent and an androgynous beauty that mesmerized men and women, Schwarzenbach seemed blessed by fate.
In 1931, driving the car she had received as a graduation present, the young Schwarzenbach travelled to Berlin to join her friends Klaus and Erika Mann, the children of Thomas Mann. She was desperately in love with Erika, and they were to share a stormy life-long friendship. She dived into the wild night-life of the German capital, which forms the backdrop of her second work of fiction, Lyrische Novelle (1933). It portrays an ill-fated passion between an actress and the narrator, to whom Schwarzenbach gave the persona of a man, even though the short work is patently a story of a lesbian infatuation. While in Berlin, Schwarzenbach was introduced to morphine, to which she developed an addiction that continued to the end of her life – she made many painful and unsuccessful attempts to wean herself from drugs, alcohol and tobacco.
Alarmed by the rise of Nazism, Schwarzenbach and the Manns founded an anti-fascist journal that attracted contributions from Brecht, Einstein, Gide, Huxley and other luminaries. In 1934 Schwarzenbach and Klaus Mann attended an international workers’ conference in Moscow. The scion of the haute bourgeoisie was fascinated with the place of writers in the Soviet Union, though she never subscribed to Marxism or joined the Communists. Soon Hitler’s government forbade her to live in Germany. Her political ideas did not sit well with her family, who applauded Hitler’s rise to power, and her private life also caused concern, even though her mother had a long-term amorous relationship with a female opera singer. What Schwarzenbach would do with her life was not clear, but already Wanderlust had emerged as its major theme.
In late 1933 Schwarzenbach set off for a six-month trip to the Middle East, traversing Turkey, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq on the way to take part in an archaeological dig in Persia. The trip inspired articles that she published in Swiss newspapers, a travelogue and a series of short stories. The following year she again journeyed to Persia, where she met Claude Achille Clarac, a French diplomat posted to Tehran. They were married in 1935, although they remained together for only a few months before Schwarzenbach continued her peregrinations. Indeed, they would almost never see each other again, even if they remained friends and spouses.
Schwarzenbach’s personal life continued to be nightmarish: she was frequently confined in drug-treatment clinics and made several suicide attempts. Yet in spite of her problems she proved capable of periods of extraordinary energy and productive work. In 1936 and 1937 she made two trips to the United States, travelling from Maine to the Deep South and writing incisive features on the effects of the Depression on factory workers and sharecroppers. In Europe, she filed reports from the Baltic countries, from Vienna on the eve of the Anschluss, and from Prague, chronicling the advance of Hitler’s supporters. In 1939, with the Swiss travel-writer Ella Maillart, she made an even more ambitious and fantastic voyage. With Schwarzenbach at the wheel of her brand-new, specially equipped Ford, the two women drove from the Adriatic to Afghanistan, an expedition recounted by Schwarzenbach in her reportages in Swiss and foreign newspapers.
In 1940 Schwarzenbach again headed to the United States, only to be repatriated from New York after a particularly bad bout of drug use, another attempted suicide and violent psychotic episodes. Within months of reaching home, she left for the Congo, in the vague hope of joining the Free French (with her marriage, she had become a French citizen and she travelled on a diplomatic passport). There she went upriver, deep into the equatorial forest, to report on Belgian and French colonialism. This discovery of yet another world brought her a rare interlude of drug-free peace and calm. On the way back to Switzerland she stopped off to see her husband, who was now a diplomat in Spanish Morocco. Schwarzenbach then went home to the chalet that she maintained in Sils, an idyllic lakeside retreat in the Engadine. There, in a freak accident in 1942, she fell off a bicycle, suffering a head injury; her body, wrecked by years of abuse, survived for only three weeks. ‘Death is too incomprehensible and too inhumane … it loses its violent character only if we await it as the only means given to us finally to escape our moments of madness,’ she had written.
Schwarzenbach had fallen in love with a number of women, some of them incapable of returning her affections, others unable to endure her demanding passion, and none able to save her from self-destructive urges. In addition to Erika Mann and, probably, Ella Maillart, there was Barbara Wright, the photographer with whom she first went to America; the wife of a French archaeologist with whom she stayed in Afghanistan; and one of her women doctors. There was also Anita Forrer, a Swiss neighbour, and Margot von Opel, wife of the car manufacturer. Schwarzenbach was herself on the receiving end of an obsessive passion when Carson McCullers fell in love with her in New York in 1940.
‘Now I want to tell a story, beautiful and ordinary, in which one will find the words “love” and “happiness”, which almost saved us, another young girl and me, from the fatality that caught up with her soon afterwards.’ Thus begins the second part of Schwarzenbach’s Death in Persia, written in Iran but fully published only posthumously. The book is a fictionalized account of Schwarzenbach’s infatuation with the daughter of the Turkish ambassador to Tehran. In the novel, death pursues the narrator, who is suffering from malaria and a debilitating infection. Yalé, the daughter of a Turk and a Cherkassian, suffers from tuberculosis. They provide comfort to each other until the Turk stops their meetings and sends his daughter away; the narrator learns of her death in the midst of feverish imaginings and angelic visitations.
The French writer Roger Martin du Gard once presented a book to Schwarzenbach with the inscription ‘To the inconsolable angel’. She was one of the ‘bright young things’ of the 1920s: fluent in several languages, a guest at the best hotels or at the homes of diplomats, and always elegantly dressed in fine Parisian couture. Her travels into the Middle East and Central Asia, Africa and America were the dream of adventurous voyagers, and her newspaper reports eloquently documented the upheaval of four continents in the inter-war years. Against this background of cultured independence, Schwarzenbach’s novels and stories describe the traumas and pains of private lives. Her own life reflects the dangers faced by those who bore the heavy weight of ambition, family expectations and the temptations of a fast life. Schwarzenbach remains relatively little known – few of her writings have been translated into English, for example – but she herself has been a character in others’ works. Ella Maillart made her ‘Christina’ in her novel The Cruel Journey, about their expedition to Afghanistan, which also inspired a film, The Journey to Kafiristan (2001).
Lula Carson Smith – Carson McCullers, as she would later become – was born in Columbus, a dusty mill town on the Chattahoochee river in Georgia. ‘I yearned for one particular thing: to get away from Columbus and to make my mark on the world,’ she would recall in her uncompleted autobiography. So she did, but it was the land and people of the American South – the pine forests and red clay soil; the ramshackle little towns where whites and blacks lived separated by the heritage of slavery and the Civil War; and the frustrations of their lives, including their often thwarted yearning for sex and love – that provided the raw material for her novels and stories. She confessed that ‘even as a grown woman I was haunted by homesickness’.
McCullers was the daughter of a jeweller and enjoyed a largely comfortable and fulfilled existence that is not always reflected in her writings. She displayed an early and promising interest in the piano, but after finishing secondary school decided to go to Manhattan to study creative writing at Columbia University and New York University. She remained in New York for the rest of her life, apart from regular trips back to Georgia, a period in North Carolina, her travel overseas and an extended stay in Paris, where she bought a house.
McCullers was twice married to the same man – Reeves McCullers, an emotionally insecure army officer – but their separations and reunions, and his eventual suicide in 1953, brought her great distress. She also had liaisons with other men, including the composer David Diamond, a predominantly gay man with whom Reeves also fell in love. Yet many in New York (though perhaps not in Georgia) considered McCullers lesbian in her temperament and her desires; she sometimes dressed in men’s clothes and, indeed, told one friend that, metaphorically, she had been born a man. She experienced recurring infatuations with other women, including Greta Garbo.
In 1940 McCullers met Annemarie Schwarzenbach, the brilliant, rich and troubled Swiss author. Hers, McCullers remembered, was ‘a face that would haunt me to the end of my life, beautiful, blond, with straight short hair. There was a look of suffering on her face that I could not define … she was bodily resplendent.’ They fell deeply in love, although in her autobiography McCullers reveals only that they exchanged a kiss. When McCullers’ husband asked her whether she was in love with Schwarzenbach, she replied that she did not know, and he slapped her fiercely. While the women were together in New York, Schwarzenbach tried to commit suicide – a disturbing incident for McCullers, who was much distressed to learn of the Swiss woman’s death several years later. Schwarzenbach’s last letter had told her, ‘Carson, remember our moments of understanding, and how much I loved you’, and McCullers commented: ‘I don’t know of a friend whom I loved more and was more grieved by her sudden death.’
McCullers’ milieu included many lesbians and gay men. She lived for some time in a Brooklyn brownstone house with a remarkable assortment of largely homosexual housemates: W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Richard Wright, Aaron Copeland, Paul and Jane Bowles, and the striptease artiste Gypsy Rose Lee. She was also a frequent visitor at Yaddo, an artists’ colony where she became friends with homosexuals including Tennessee Williams, the composer Colin McPhee, the literary critic Newton Arvin and the sexually ambivalent author Katherine Anne Porter.
Homosexuality appears regularly in McCullers’ works, often embedded in stories of the loneliness and repressed desires of her Southern people – a strand that runs through the writing of other authors of ‘Southern Gothic’, from William Faulkner to Truman Capote and McCullers’ fellow Georgian Flannery O’Connor, whose life was also characterized by lesbian friendships. Sensitive men, tomboy women and hints of reprobate sexual urges appear throughout McCullers’ novels. Her women, such as those in The Member of the Wedding (1946), refuse to be Southern belles and yearn for intimacy – sometimes with other women. One of the main characters of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) is Biff, a man who believes that all people belong by nature to both sexes, and who adopts such unmanly habits as wearing scent and redecorating his house. In 1(1941; it is dedicated to Schwarzenbach), Captain Weldon Pendleton is homosexual, and heterosexually impotent. He lusts after his wife’s lover and has mixed, but passionate, feelings of love and hate for a comely private who spies voyeuristically on his wife. Pendleton’s shooting of the soldier is a violent expression of his incapacity to act on his own erotic desires. The book earned McCullers a degree of animosity in her home town, which is close to Fort Benning, a huge army base. On one visit, she received a threatening phone call from a member of the Ku Klux Klan, who told her, ‘We don’t like nigger lovers or fairies’ – a comment that only reinforced her antiracist sentiments and her identification with sexual dissidents.
Perhaps her most clearly limned portrait of homosexual love (once again male) comes as a sub-plot in Clock without Hands (1961). Jester Clane is a 17-year-old orphan raised by his racist grandfather, a judge who takes covertly to reading the Kinsey Report on human sexuality. The young Clane develops an attraction for Sherman Pew, another orphan, who has mixed white and black parentage: Clane’s desire thus constitutes racial as well as sexual transgression. Clane fears that to touch Pew would be a mortal sin, but when he has sex in a brothel he fantasizes that the prostitute is his buddy. Eventually they become close friends rather than lovers, as both youths try to unravel secrets from their past. The story leads to a tragic end, their lives mingled until the last.
In the midst of McCullers’ generally dark stories of misfits and outcasts is an occasional ray of hopeful affirmation. In The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943), in which every character seems sexually and romantically lost or in the grip of a passion that cannot be consummated, the narrator remarks of one particularly odd partnership that ‘the good people thought that if those two had found some satisfaction of the flesh between themselves, then it was a matter concerning them and God alone’.