The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

  Nellie acknowledged that letter writing allowed her to be closer and more expansive with Muriel than their actual time together. In a gesture that Muriel could not have overlooked, Nellie penned this undated letter on stationery with the printed return address crossed out: The Grange, Loughton, Essex. (See fig. 4.16.) By so doing, Nellie implicitly invited Muriel to remember their shared intimacies and confidences at the Grange. She had been welcomed there as a beloved friend and family member. The crossed out words underscored her removal from this cherished scene: the Grange was not her home, the Lesters, not her family.

  4.16. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, n.d., Nellie Dowell Letters. (Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute.)

  Distance inflamed desire while liberating Nellie to articulate her feelings.144 She enacted this dynamic by moving from the emphatic assertion, “I do miss you,” to the unanswered question, “why it is I don’t know” which culminated in a complex double negative: “don’t … think I don’t love you.” This rhetorical structure recurs throughout the letters and did important psychological work for Nellie. She asked Muriel to “take notice” of her by giving her permission to ignore her and “don’t take notice of me.” She laid a strong claim to her feelings for Muriel only to soften and deflect them through questions and negatives. A process of thwarted self-discovery sustained their epistolary relationship. Nellie did not know and could not name why she missed Muriel so much, why each separation only intensified and made “worse” her longing for her. Rather than posthumously presuming to know what Nellie did not, we may be better served considering the implications of her “not knowing.”

  Knowing and not knowing, naming and not naming same-sex desire have preoccupied scholars for at least four decades. Knowing and naming same-sex sexual desires marked, we are told, the simultaneous birth of homosexual identities and communities as well as the emergence of harsher forms of surveillance and punishment of them.145 Assertions of sexual self-knowledge recapitulate the metanarrative of “coming out.” They function as signs of empowerment for the individual and the community into which the sexually knowing self is ushered.146

  Nothing suggests that Nellie had access to sexological categories, even if Muriel may have. Those who have examined most closely who did—and did not—have knowledge of “lesbianism” across British society in the early twentieth century have found no evidence that proletarian laboring women like Nellie would have even heard the word.147 We can chart with much greater precision the Mediterranean voyages of F. R. Leyland’s SS Lesbian in the late nineteenth century than the youthful life history of its sexological namesake during this same time period.148 Nellie would have been much more familiar with “mateship”—a form of mutually supportive, loving friendships between laboring women.149

  For the past two decades, “queerness” has emerged as an analytical category detached from categories of identity and their twofold politics of self and community. Queer offers an alternative to gay and lesbian that encompasses a broad range of nonconforming desires and practices, imaginings and actions. Refusing fixity, queerness disrupts normative categories of identity that produce insiders and outsiders, those who belong and those who do not.150 Some argue that its purchase depends upon its mystifications, illegibility, and refusal of identity. That which cannot be fixed cannot be held hostage to the imperatives of norms themselves. Such an account dismantles a gay and lesbian pantheon of foremothers and forefathers in favor of those who evaded or refused to name their sexuality.151

  What intellectual work can queer do in thinking about Muriel, Nellie, and their relationship? Muriel’s rejection of all “labels” as constitutive of oppressive hierarchies and norms might be construed as a kind of queer politics avant la lettre. Characterizing Nellie’s feelings for Muriel as queer rather than homoerotic or lesbian forecloses the need to make claims about her sexual identity and underscores the likelihood that neither Nellie nor Muriel felt the need to invoke languages of sexual selfhood.152 In any case, it’s not possible to parse the boundaries between non-sexual caring labor and the erotic pleasure that Nellie and Muriel may—or may not—have felt when Nellie brushed Muriel’s hair and they chatted late into the night.153 What is extraordinary is that they managed to create for themselves a world in which a wealthy shipbuilder’s daughter and a half-orphaned match factory girl could share such intimacies and revel in such pleasures with the blessings of their families.

  Nellie’s language of love is entirely untouched by sexology or what Laura Doan calls “Sapphic modernity.” She sometimes playfully used terms such as “Old Maid” and “widower” to denote sexual and marital status. On Valentine’s Day 1912, she coped with Muriel’s long absence by asking Muriel to find her a “proper widower” but only “one that will let me go with you or he will not suit.” Had they joked with one another about the respective demands of “proper” and “improper” widowers? As if to deflect the danger of masculine intrusion upon their intimacy, she immediately reassured Muriel that “I am longing for the time to see you again it seems Months instead of weeks since I saw you & then I did have you all to myself sometimes.” “Having” Muriel all to herself was a pleasure Nellie craved but rarely enjoyed. She accompanied her declaration of unwavering love for Muriel—“nothing will turn me what if you do”—by purporting to be “a miserable Old Maid.” Her capital letters imply irony, a recycling of a stock phrase that she does not quite accept for herself. Nellie loves Muriel and enjoys herself far too much to be either “miserable” or an “Old Maid.”

  Nellie’s lighthearted substitution of Muriel for a hypothetical “proper widower” hints at a language of same-sex domestic partnership; but it does so without any trace of gender “trouble.” Nellie invokes neither husband-wife relations nor an eroticized sisterliness so typical of women’s “intimate friendships.” In “From Birth to Death,” Muriel quoted Nellie’s own explanation for why she never married. Marriage provided no security for working-class mothers like her beloved grandmother (Harriet Sloan), mother (Harriet Dowell), and older sister (Florence Dellar). Their loss of male breadwinner spouses through death or disablement had impoverished them and their children. Nellie, so Muriel tells us, was determined to avoid the gendered violence of poverty on families, especially its material, affective, and psychological costs to women as wives and mothers. Class, economics, and gender—not sex, sexology, and identity—explain Nellie’s choice to remain single.

  What about Muriel’s love for Nellie and her own status as an unmarried woman? Not a single word or phrase in Muriel’s three biographical sketches of Nellie suggest that she harbored erotic feelings for her. She conveys admiration, gratitude, tenderness, empathy, and love for her. But longing? Or possessiveness? Or desire? None. This may be a function of when she wrote these narratives and deeply asymmetrical sources. Muriel drafted her homages to Nellie in 1923, nearly thirteen years after their “first loving” one another. Nellie had been an invalid for several years, rarely venturing out of her house next door to the Lesters on Bruce Road. The years of their most intense partnership were over. Several other single women had joined what Muriel called her “synthetic family” in Bow and claimed their share of her affections.154 Nellie’s letters are without doubt the most erotically charged documents in Muriel’s emotionally cool archive. Muriel’s letters to Nellie have not survived, although Nellie alludes to them in her own. The libidinal asymmetries in their friendship may well be accentuated by archival asymmetries. There is no Nellie Dowell archive apart from Muriel’s where we might find Muriel’s loving letters to Nellie written as their relationship unfolded and deepened after 1910.

  In her prolific body of published life writing, Muriel never discussed singleness and sexuality, her own or others.155 In response to a challenge posed c. 1925 by an “intellectual brother in law” about why she lived at Kingsley Hall, Muriel explained one benefit of the Hall to the young people in the local community: “Sex relationships can develope [sic] normally in Kingsley Hall instead of being either f
iercely repressed or furtively experienced in the semi shadow of a street door.” Here, she articulated a sense that there is such thing as normal sex relationships but that they require suitable environmental conditions in which to flourish. Rather than reflecting on her own sex feelings, she shifted ground by declaring that Kingsley Hall allowed her to “spend my life in the midst of one of the jolliest biggest families I’ve ever known.”156 There is no evidence that Muriel experienced romantic attraction to any person. Nor did anyone feel the need to invoke a youthful “disappointment” in love to explain why she never married—a tactic used by the biographer of the famous bachelor bishop of London, Arthur Foley Winnington Ingram. Her friend, the pacifist memoirist Vera Brittain, mourned a fallen soldier sweetheart while forming an intimate companionship with Winifred Holtby and marrying.157 Perhaps Muriel was untouched by sexual desire or celibacy was what she wanted.158

  Contemporaries did not share Muriel’s reluctance to talk about sex and singleness. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, defenders and critics of spinster do-gooders proffered psychosexual accounts of them. Some, like sexologist Havelock Ellis and homosexual rights advocate Edward Carpenter, praised single women for turning their “inverted” or “uranian” same-sex desires into social good. Altruism, they argued, expressed their homosexuality. For William Dampier Whetham and his wife Catherine (Stephen Hobhouse’s first cousin), single women like Muriel lacked the “wholesome instinct of the family.” They were social menaces disguised in the sheep’s clothing of disinterested virtue. As part of their jeremiad against the “caravanserie” of restaurants, hotels, and modern consumer culture, the Whethams joined Muriel in calling for “simplicity of life.” At the same time, they pathologized unmarried women whose “social, political, philanthropic, and educational work” grew out of their selfish quest to gratify their own desires for influence in public life.159 Selfishness, not selflessness, actuated their apparent benevolence.

  Muriel’s fellow traveler, the pacifist socialist Maude Royden, readily borrowed continental psychoanalytic frameworks in discussing her own unmarried life of Christian social action. Royden talked fearlessly and wrote prolifically about sex. She took a leading role in shaping a Christian psychology and sexology in the interwar years.160 In 1916, she detailed the social, economic, and gendered circumstances that siphoned poor women into the sex trade as prostitutes. Her defense of the power, dignity, and beauty of sexuality, Sex and Common-Sense (1921) rescued sex from “furtive whisper[s] and silly jokes.” “The great impulse of sex is part of our very being,” and, she declared, “it is not base.” It was ennobling, a reflection of the divine impulse of creation in humanity. She even dared to imagine the young man Jesus in his “agony of longing” and fleshly temptation. The greatest lovers of the outcast—Jesus, St. Francis, St. Catherine, and St. Theresa—suffered the torments of unsatisfied sexual desires. They refused to “repress” or “dissipate” their sex drive “but so used it for the service of man that there is in all the history of man, no life so rich, more human, more full of love, more full of creation, or more full of power than the lives of these celibate men and women, who learned from Christ how they could live and love.”161

  Royden anticipated Freud’s much more celebrated and influential analysis of St. Francis and other ascetic saints in Civilization and Its Discontents (first published in 1930). Freud argued that Francis and his ilk protected themselves from the “uncertainties and disappointments of genital love by turning away from its sexual aims” and instead loving “all men alike.” “Inhibited” sexual aims manifest themselves in “evenly suspended, steadfast, affectionate feeling.”162 For Royden, the satisfactions of such altruism were emphatically not protection from disappointment or the redirection of a sex impulse that somehow had gone astray.163 With unflinching honesty, Royden confronted the imperative to liberate single celibate women from the constraints of social conventions, which compelled them to “repress” their natural and healthy hunger for intimacy.164 Royden’s response to the explosion in psychology and sexology during the first three decades of the twentieth century was to embed these “sciences” within her radical Christian theology of social justice.

  This was just what Muriel would not do. She never went to the “dark places of psychology” where Virginia Woolf believed the truths of the self and modern life were secreted.165 Muriel was not evasive or out of date or repressed. She was every bit as modern and vastly more progressive in her social and personal politics than Woolf. Her breakdown in 1916–17 had led her to find another place where truth resided. And it was brilliantly illuminated by God’s love. The Prayer of Relaxation healed her mind and body. Practicing the Presence of God was the therapy she chose to discover the Divine deep within her. Like fellow Guild of Health members, she was well informed about the latest books and articles in psychology and psychoanalysis, which were regularly reviewed in the Guild’s publications. For Muriel, Jesus was the master psychologist of the modern world and God’s love its most potent resource. In place of a psychosexual identity, Muriel trained herself to find God’s love within her. Filling herself with God’s love may well have left no room inside Muriel for sexual desire and romantic love.

  In Nellie’s most incisive, complex, and candid assessment of her relationship with Muriel and their shared labors at Kingsley Hall, she represents Muriel both as a daughter of the pristine luxury of the Grange, and as “Mother” of “dear old Kingsley Hall” in “dirty old Bow.” The letter probably dates from 1916 when a “zep” bombed Kingsley Hall in the early morning of September 24.

  Your Nell did want to be

  with you longer. you always

  push me off lately if I had

  have known I was not going

  to see you again I would

  not have gone for that ride

  & I would not come at all

  but I wanted to see you

  that was better than all.

  but you did try to be jolly

  with the women & got to

  excited. you did not let

  me show you Kent Hills on

  Bromley Bridge

  you don’t know how I

  have taken your many kindness

  to me. You have been my best

  friend on this earth & I

  always feel I belong to you

  somehow, you have held me

  back so I ought to love

  you & do anything for you166

  This letter verges on but never quite turns into a disappointed lover’s lament. (See fig. 4.17.) It is a queerly powerful missive. It conveys Nellie’s hurt that Muriel refused her the exclusive intimacy she craves. The opening, “Your Nell,” ostensibly confirms Nellie’s deepest desire to “belong” to Muriel. The phrases that follow in quick succession make clear Muriel’s unwillingness to possess Nellie as fully as she wishes: “you always push me off lately.” Nellie softens the rebuke of “always” with “lately,” implicitly recalling a time when Muriel did not push her off. The word “somehow” is syntactically ambiguous. It ends the thought “I always feel I belong to you somehow;” but it also begins a new one, “somehow you have held me back.” “Somehow” disrupts the logic of Nellie’s wishful claim to belong to Muriel by registering Nellie’s disappointment in Muriel’s demand for distance. Nellie invokes the powerful obligations binding the giver and receiver of kindness. She “always” feels she “belongs” to Muriel, her “best friend on this earth.”

  4.17. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, n.d. (1916), Nellie Dowell Letters. (Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute.)

  While Nellie states that she “ought to love you [Muriel],” the letter asserts Nellie’s insistence that Muriel “ought” to return her love. She concludes with an expression of love for Muriel and the dirty world they share. “I can’t be happy till you come home to dirty old Bow and dear old Kingsley Hall with all its dirt it shows its use for the purpose its got for, it only wants its Mother.” It was an act of supreme generosity for t
he erstwhile match girl who coveted a lady’s clean white hands to sanction the immersion of her own best beloved lady, Muriel Lester, in “dirty old Bow” to serve its people. To do its Christian revolutionary work of cleansing Bow, Kingsley Hall, like its Mother, had to get dirty. Nellie knew and accepted this.

  Nellie’s description of Muriel as “Mother” of Kingsley Hall suggests that she may have seen herself as one of the Hall’s—and Muriel’s—many daughters in their radical reconfiguration of family as an elastic public and private unit. During Kingsley Hall’s first decade, its residents were unmarried women committed to self-denying lives advancing the social good. By the early 1920s, the press dubbed Kingsley Hall a “modern monastery.”167 Perhaps Nellie, by naming Muriel the Hall’s “Mother,” articulated her sense of belonging to a quasi-monastic community of women, bound to one another by deep ties of affection and mutual obligation. Muriel, the charismatic “Mother” of this sacred and secular family, was its spiritual leader; and, at least for Nellie, the elusive object of her desires.168 If Kingsley Hall “wanted” Muriel, so too did Nellie.

  Reconstructing their friendship through their own writings is inescapably claustrophobic. No evidence makes it possible to see Nellie and Muriel as others saw them. Nellie does offer one mediated glimpse of a neighbor’s impression of them in her earliest surviving letter. On a rainy Sunday night in mid-November 1910 Nellie reported to Muriel that she and “Miss Doris” were getting along “splendidly” without her: “but I do miss you ever so much no one can take your place now.” After recounting all her hard work “visiting” neighbors and organizing a charity bazaar, Nellie urges Muriel to “enjoy yourself & don’t come home & say I have got some news I am going away again or I shall follow you.” With evident delight, she informed Muriel that a poor neighbor in Bow, Mrs. Starling, had asked her “if I missed you.”