No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami (inspirational books for women TXT) 📗

a very real strain on one’s vitality. Prohibitions were imposed for whose reason we might not ask. We were pruned of every form of self-expression, like the single flower on an exhibition stem, until everything in us went into a single desire, freedom, which we saw only in wind or in the breaking waves and as we could not hold these, into what was nearest to them, poetry.

She ran away several times but got no further than the end of the street. As with Sylvia Beach, books were her childhood refuge and she identified with heroic fictional figures. Sir John’s library, with its leather armchairs and stoked fires, was shelved with leather-bound editions of the classics. The titles of the complete works of Charles Dickens were tooled in gold on red bindings. On the walls were landscapes in oil – a precipice on Capri with fig trees in the foreground, a mid-period Corot of the Loire on a grey day.

For Bryher, from the age of five, escape from the oppression of South Audley Street was to sail with her parents on her father’s ships: ‘I watched the seamen enviously because the thing I wanted most was a boy’s sailor suit.’ In a memoir, The Heart to Artemis, she wrote of journeys in the decade before the First World War, to Egypt, Turkey, Italy, Spain, North Africa. She described the streets of Cairo, learning Arabic, taking a steamship down the Nile, trekking through the desert on donkey back, walking in Capri, climbing the Alps, nights in tents and palaces. She loved these travels. They created in her a restless international view, a disregard for the notion of home as a fixed place. Travel became natural to her as a lifestyle. When adult, she crossed the globe with the same nonchalance as others might go to the shops. ‘“What do you expect me to do for you?” my analyst asked many years later. “As a child you have been in paradise.”’

a brother

When Bryher was fifteen, in 1909, her brother, John, was born. A son was the apotheosis of family for Sir John Ellerman. To legitimize his son’s birth and inheritance rights, he married Hannah Glover under a little-known Scottish law, per verba de praesenti, by which a couple could be legally married without witness if they lived together in Scotland for twenty-one successive days. Sir John’s son might not easily have succeeded to his baronetcy or business were he identified as illegitimate.

All that Bryher, as Winifred or Dolly, had been denied was heaped on her brother. He was his father’s heir and would inherit the Ellerman empire. His path was not easy and his childhood was lonely. His father forbade him ordinary pleasures – like going to see a Charlie Chaplin film. He was not allowed outside without a hat, and almost predictably had little interest in finance or business as an adult. His life’s work and passion became the study of rodents. He lectured and published scholarly articles and a three-volume, 1,500-page monograph, The Families and Genera of Living Rodents, with a list of named forms (1758–1936).2

Bryher hated him from the off. It was bad enough, after fifteen years of being the only child, to be usurped by a sibling, but the unfairness of the blatant privilege bestowed on this boy compounded the insult of her illegitimacy and sense of gender incongruence. It also honed her feminism and guided her subversion and rebellion. A core element of her embrace of new writing and thinking was the sense that the values of the past were patriarchal, stifling, and inordinately unfair.

To her conservative father, she was his daughter, his Dolly. He was bewildered by her. Her path was to be a wife and mother, ergo she must wear frocks, be debarred from working in his or in any business, and by laws of primogeniture, enforced by men of power like himself, after the birth of his son, be excluded from inheriting his estate.

boarding school

In what to Bryher was a literal act of rejection, immediately after her brother’s birth she was packed off to Queenswood Ladies’ College in Eastbourne. There were eighty boarders aged nine to seventeen and a few day girls:

I was flung into a crowded boarding school to sink or swim alone… Nobody gave any explanations; it was a perfect preparation for Freud. The experience could have driven me to insanity or suicide and it was as crippling for a time as a paralytic stroke. I did not recover from it until long after psychoanalysis and I survived only because I was tough.

School highlighted her sense of dislocation. ‘I had the emotional development of a boy of nine,’ she said of herself. She did not know who or where she was or how to communicate in this bewildering, unfamiliar environment. She said she did not understand the vernacular of ‘bags I this seat’ or ‘funny old fish’. She hated the discipline but liked the food. Her marks were average.

‘Nobody gave any explanations’ was Bryher’s protest about her strange childhood. Her mother described the home environment as like being in a glass case. For Bryher, cut off from herself and others by wealth, emotional inarticulacy and assumptions about gender, it was like being marooned. If she could not be Winifred Glover or Winifred Ellerman, then who was she?

a friend

At school she made her first friend. Doris Banfield was half Scillonian, half Cornish, and her father too was a shipowner. In 1911 Bryher was allowed to go for a summer holiday with the Banfield family to their house in the Scillies: ‘It was an instantaneous falling in love… the sea, islands and boats.’ With Doris, she swam in the sea, collected shells (‘cowries were the great prize’), went out in small fishing boats, landed on uninhabited islets – ‘even to see a puffin on the rocks near where we were sitting seemed an intrusion’. Doris had a fox terrier called Sampie with a black spot above his tail. Bryher was happy,