Patience & Sarah
LITTLE SISTER’S CLASSICS
Patience & Sarah
ISABEL MILLER
ARSENAL PULP PRESS
Vancouver
PATIENCE & SARAH
Copyright © 1969 by Isabel Miller under the title A Place for Us
Preface and introduction copyright © 2005 by the authors
First Arsenal Pulp Press edition: 2005
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form by any means — graphic, electronic or mechanical — without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review.
ARSENAL PULP PRESS
#102-211 East Georgia St.
Vancouver, B.C.
Canada V6A 1Z6
www.arsenalpulp.com
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for its publishing activities.
Little Sister’s Classics series editor: Mark Macdonald
Editors for the press: Robert Ballantyne and Brian Lam
Text and cover design: Shyla Seller
Front cover illustration from the McGraw-Hill edition of Patience & Sarah
Little Sister’s Classics logo design: Hermant Gohil
Printed and bound in Canada
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental.
Efforts have been made to locate copyright holders of source material wherever possible. The publisher welcomes hearing from any copyright holders of material used in this book who have not been contacted.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:
Miller, Isabel, 1924
Patience & Sarah / Isabel Miller.
First published under title: A place for us.
ISBN 1-55152-191-1
I. Title. II. Title: Patience and Sarah.
PS3563.I419P38 2005 813’.54 C2005-903852-7
ISBN-13 978-1-55152-191-6
eISBN-13 978-1-55152-357-6
Contents
Preface
Introduction by Emma Donoghue
Patience & Sarah
Appendices
Patience and Sarah Come to Live by Elizabeth Deran
Early manuscript pages
Cover of A Place for Us
Correspondence
Frontierswomen in Love by Bell Gail Chevigny
Opera materials
Alma Routsong obituary by Edward Field
Preface
With great pleasure, Little Sister’s Classics presents Patience & Sarah, one of the most widely read and influential lesbian novels of the 1960s. With its poetic language and pioneering sensibilities, this book describes love between two women who forge in an unforgiving world, inventing their own lives as they go – building for themselves a new lesbian identity.
As compelling as the novel itself is the story of how it came to be written, for the author was something of a pioneer. Alma Routsong wrote as “Isabel Miller,” referencing her mother’s maiden name, Miller, and an anagram of the word “lesbia.” With her partner she struggled against writer’s block and often-fruitless research into the lives of a very real pioneering lesbian couple, the painter Mary Ann Willson and her companion “Miss Brundidge.”
Although the folk-art paintings by Willson still grace gallery walls, little is known about Miss Brundidge. Indeed, the spelling of her name – sometimes Brundage – has confounded historians and biographers because both spellings existed within previous editions of the book. Routsong, who through the use of a Ouija board came to believe Miss Brundidge’s first name was Florence, dedicated her book to the couple using the Brundidge spelling, which is the spelling used in this edition.
The acclaimed author and historian Emma Donoghue has provided an insightful and thoughtful introduction, for which we are grateful. Further, we would like to extend our profound gratitude to Elisabeth Deran and Julie Weber for their obliging help in assembling the appendix materials for this edition, and to the poet Edward Field for his revealing obituary of the author.
May this beautiful novel never disappear from print again!
– Mark Macdonald, 2005
Introduction
EMMA DONOGHUE
‘I figure to take up land and make me a place,’ she said. ‘Alone?’ I asked.
A watercolour of a mermaid on the wall of a folk museum. A bare handful of facts: Mary Ann Willson, “farmerette” companion Miss Brundidge, “romantic attachment,” Greene County, New York State, circa 1820. The ideal springboard for a novel.
For a writer, plentiful sources are tempting to imagine, exciting to find, appalling to work with: they can get in your way like bricks piled up in the road. Over the course of the year that Alma Routsong spent combing the libraries for more data on Willson and Brundidge, she was thwarted at almost every point. But how smart she was, in the end, to realise that the blank slate could set her vision free. “Any stone from their hill is a crystal ball,” she wrote in the 1969 afterword to the novel, and we learn from Elisabeth Deran’s memoir piece in the appendix to this edition that the crystal ball wasn’t just a metaphor: she and Routsong, in a fascinatingly collaborative literary process, used a Ouija board to call up Brundidge and Willson and ask them about their lives. The result of this unorthodox approach was that instead of writing a fact-based novel about two obscure historical figures, Routsong invented Sarah and Patience and told a story with the clean lines, the timeless force, the peculiar shine of legend.
I knew she’d let me go with her, and that she was only trying to play man, all slow and steady, not impulsive, weighing carefully. I was amused but didn’t say so. Time enough later to teach her that it’s better to be a real woman than an imitation man, and that when someone chooses a woman to go away with it’s because a woman is what’s preferred.
The official version of lesbian history tells us that in the 1970s, lesbian feminists sternly rejected the butch-femme roleplay (which they saw as mimicking the worst heterosexual stereotypes) of lesbian bar culture. But here is Alma Routsong in 1965 writing a novel that upsets that neat opposition: a profoundly feminist work that questions but also celebrates and eroticizes difference in gender roles.
Sarah Dowling’s arrival at the White farm with a load of wood causes a shocking stir because she is dressed like a boy. “Her breeches didn’t hide how soft she is below. Maybe they even brought it out,” Patience reminisces pleasurably. Sarah’s masculinity is explained as a result of being raised as “Pa’s boy,” for the practical needs of an all-girl farming family, but as she says, it “seems natural” to her, and mostly feels good.
Desire between women is everywhere in this book – between Patience and her sister-in-law Martha, and Sarah and her sister Rachel, in particular – but rarely acted on. The gender difference between Sarah and Patience is the tinder spark, the thing that forces them to notice their attraction and act on it instead of sublimating it into romantic friendship as most women seem to have done before the late twentieth century. During an early conversation Patience feels she would like to hug Sarah “in the commonplace way of women together,” but “something about” the girl makes it impossible: “She didn’t do woman things.” Later, Sarah works out even more clearly that it was learning to shoot a gun that let her acknowledge desire: “I could take care of myself, and not be beholden, and love who my feeling went to. I suppose lots of girls loved Patience but never said. Maybe it was because I could shoot that I could say.”
But at other times, Sarah’s masculinity is an
obstacle, for instance when she tries to have her own way like a husband by tricking Patience into settling in Greene County instead of heading farther west. And on her trip with Parson Peel, passing as a boy for the first time, Sarah finds aspects of masculinity she loathes, such as the fistfighting. As for Patience, she may enjoy the sight of Sarah in breeches, but she prefers the rest of the world not to see and be scandalised by it. And even in private, she never treats Sarah as a man; for instance, when Sarah gallantly puts her mittens on an icy log for Patience to sit on, Patience tells us “I didn’t like to sit when she didn’t, or see her go barehanded for my sake, so I stayed standing.”
Patience’s own gender role is just as ambivalent. She delights in many aspects of traditional femininity – sewing a dress for Sarah, baking her a cake, being tactful, sometimes crafty – but she is a rebel too, though not in a sartorial way; she is the “old-maid aunt” who would rather paint pictures than sit around spinning. Her father used to say that when he realised the vigorous new baby was a girl “his heart nearly broke for me, wondering how someone with all that go could stand to be a woman.” And class complicates the issue: Patience gets much of her power not from being womanly but from being ladylike, able, for instance, with her social confidence and a few cold words to quell the man who is threatening Sarah with rape. So perhaps a boarding school education is what lets Patience declare her passion, just as shooting a gun does for Sarah.
As a woman who had just left her husband and four children, Alma Routsong wrote with a painful awareness of traditional womanly activities as delights but also traps: as Patience comments ruefully in the novel’s opening scene, you can’t paint a picture with a baby crawling around. So both Sarah and Patience relish their female bodies but resist the world’s prescriptions for womanhood, particularly husbands and children. Gender itself must be made new in this novel of transformation: “I began to wonder if what makes men walk so lordlike and speak so masterfully is having the love of women. If that was it, Sarah and I would make lords of each other.” The lovers are similar in as many ways as they are different, and throughout the book they swap roles: reckless leader and doubtful follower, greedy and cautious, top and bottom. Their marriage is a new invention in which Sarah may hoe and Patience may bake, but no one has to be always the husband or wife.
I held Sarah’s hand and felt the ancient sea and the new wheels carry us to a life we had no pattern for, that no one we knew of had ever lived, that we must invent for ourselves on a razor’s edge, and I tipped my head back and sang three hallelujahs.
Patience & Sarah is a novel that many of us read a long time ago and remember only hazily. One common misconception is that it is about two women pioneers homesteading on the wild frontier. In fact our Connecticut heroines take two-thirds of the book to get away from their families, and spend just the last ten pages refurbishing (with the help of hired carpenters) a farmhouse outside a town only ninety miles from New York. It is in the emotional sense that Sarah and Patience are real pioneers: they dare to live together, to put each other first. (And unlike their more famous eighteenth-century Irish foresisters, the Ladies of Llangollen, they do not have a royal pension and servants to make the process comfortable.) Patience & Sarah is an adventure story, but not one that features bears and tornadoes; it is about negotiating the complex dynamics of the early nineteenth-century rural family, and finding breathing room for that original creation, the female couple.
Significantly, in discussions with the writers of the 1998 opera based on the novel, Alma Routsong told them that she had originally planned to conclude the story with her heroines setting off on the ship, which is where the opera ends. But one of my favourite parts of the novel is their journey through New York City, with all its socially awkward encounters, squabbles, and uncertainties; we get to see how a transcendent love weathers the everyday. I think Routsong made the right decision to end the book just as her heroines move into their house: this satisfies our curiosity but avoids the longeurs of utopia. She named her novel after its destination, A Place for Us (though the publishers who reissued it, McGraw-Hill, insisted on changing the title to Patience & Sarah, possibly because the original title was too reminiscent of a song from West Side Story). Routsong intended a sequel, to be called A Time for Us, which she explained in a note on the fragment of it she published, “A Dooryard Full of Flowers” (1993), would have shown their “slow, ardent, exalted life” together – but writer’s block got in the way, perhaps unsurprisingly: happiness is very hard to turn into a plot.
Many readers misremember the novel as a soppy love story. It is a romance, certainly, but a tough-minded one in which the intense connection between the lovers is riven by conflict on almost every page: varied and erotically charged tensions that arise from the clash of a younger, butcher, straightforward but more cautious woman and an older, more educated, rasher, wilier, one. “Surely a few small coddlings wouldn’t spoil her or undermine her capable ways,” Patience thinks as she feeds Sarah that first meal, and a running theme is the need for both lovers to find a balance between the powerful satisfaction of being “capable” and the blessed relief of being “coddled.”
Their lust is presented as a force of nature, an unpredictable “mighty mystery and astonishment” which often scares them. Their improvised vocabulary of “melts,” “wets,” and “waves” may have become more familiar over the decades (since so many other lesbian writers have borrowed it!), but the taut, vibrating string of sexual tension is what holds the novel together. Alma Routsong is extremely honest about the wayward nature of lust – as witness that startling moment when a tired servant is leading them up to their rented room and Sarah finds herself aroused by the girl. Sex between our heroines is often interrupted, postponed, sometimes tender, sometimes furious, never bland: there are no feebly waving fronds of seaweed here. “I wonder if it is generally true that a heightened woman can’t be marked,” speculates Patience with a guilty delight as she searches Sarah for bite marks.
Wavering of faith means beginning to believe in this life and wanting to live it, denying all duties and dashing off uncontrolled.
One aspect of Patience & Sarah rarely discussed is its subtle take on religion. Sarah, daughter of an anti-clerical father, learns much from her time with lapsed parson Dan Peel. Patience, an orthodox goer-to-Meeting, at one point gets down on her knees to fight her lesbian desire and ends up praying for its fulfilment instead. She struggles to hold onto the core of religion: “May God save my heart for love, despite Saint Paul.” Not only is the novel’s strong, concrete language steeped in the cadences of the King James Version, but Patience constantly refers to and rewrites (or repaints) that heritage: she thinks of herself as the punished, risk-taking wife of Lot during the destruction of Sodom, or as the cowardly Peter when she won’t admit publicly to loving Sarah. When Patience first acknowledges her desire, Sarah wears “the look of Jacob granted the Angel’s blessing” after the long wrestle. And of course the first picture Patience paints in their new home is of Ruth and Naomi. But the most interesting Biblical reference is Patience’s musing on the Prodigal Son (the subject of a series of pictures by Mary Ann Willson), an image of masculine, dissolute recklessness that she comes to embrace: “What would I do, I wondered, all uncontrolled and raging and self-seeking, my tiger-soul unchained, these dangerous passions freed?” Like later works such as Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), Patience & Sarah manages to pay homage to Christianity even as it denounces it for its war on love.
Oh, we were begun. There would be no way out except through.
Patience & Sarah does not correspond to the classic shape of what would come to be called the coming-out novel. The women admit their passion to each other thirty pages in, and Sarah immediately ‘outs’ them to her sister, telling her “I found my mate.” But this matter-of- fact declaration, far from being the climax of the novel, can be seen as a blunder, since it brings on a crisis that keeps the lovers apart for many months.
It is through a discreet and often deceitful campaign that they gradually win over each other’s families. Patience does have to learn not to be afraid of the truth, and there is a moment that feels like a “wedding party” to her, when she holds Sarah’s hand in front of her brother as they set off – but it is a brief and wordless moment. On their journey into New York State, or among their neighbors where they settle, they present themselves merely as a couple of eccentric females, ‘kin’ in some unspecified way. The ‘place for us’ that Sarah and Patience crave is not primarily a farm to grow corn, but a bed where they can make love out of hearing range of hostile or uncomprehending people. That is why ultimately it does not matter to them that they have not made it to Genesee, only to the much nearer Greene County; their real quest is to find privacy and autonomy in the psychological wilderness of a patriarchal society.
And it is significant that the two never try to come up with any labels for what kind of women their ‘feeling’ makes them. This lack of interest in sexual identity seems very true to the early nineteenth century. (Even Anne Lister, who wrote reams in her secret diaries about her complicated love-life in early nineteenth-century Yorkshire, put her difference in the form of a verb, not a noun: “I love, & only love, the fairer sex . . . my heart revolts from any other love but theirs.”) In the twenty-first century, this focus on the love, rather than identity or the coming-out process, is something that has saved Patience & Sarah from dating.
Of course, many other pre-Stonewall novels share this quality of presenting a passion between two women without much labeling and without any context in a lesbian community. But if we take two that share with Patience & Sarah the extremely rare feature of a happy ending – Gale Wilhelm’s Torchlight to Valhalla (1938) and Patricia Highsmith’s Carol (1952) (a.k.a. The Price of Salt, written as Claire Morgan) – we can immediately see how groundbreaking Routsong’s novel is. The Wilhelm and Highsmith titles both have a certain tastefully literary, muted quality; communication is oblique; love between women hovers with a wary melancholy on the edge of the social world. By contrast, Patience & Sarah blazes out like a firework, and has an erotic confidence comparable only with later titles like Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) or Audre Lorde’s Zami (1982).
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