Edith and The League of Isis

Daisy in the Time of Nightmares 

A good-looking fifteen-year-old boy was in the garden one morning in October 1900, digging in his old jacket and knickerbockers. The big balconied house is gone now, burned down, but the gardens remain, in the south-east London suburb of Eltham. Then, there was a moat and rambling flowers, huge cedars full of owls and old brick walls, dating back to an ancient Tudor house where, by legend, the severed head of Thomas More had been buried by his daughter. It was a place of magic and darkness. At around eleven that morning, a doctor and an anaesthetist arrived at the gate. The boy’s mother, still asleep, was woken up. She made him bathe and get into some clean clothes for the simple operation to come–a removal of his adenoids because of the heavy colds he had had. Two hours later, the boy’s father emerged white-faced. After the doctors had given the boy chloroform, done their work and left, the boy, whose name was Fabian, had died. There were two grieving women present. One was known as Mouse. The other was Fabian’s mother, Edith, who in her despair tried to warm up and revive the child with hot water bottles. Later, talking of the thirteen-year-old girl who was also part of the family, she raged at her husband: ‘Why couldn’t it have been Rosamund?’ Terribly, Rosamund overheard the words. And her world started to fall in as well. For she began to realize she was not the daughter of Edith at all. She was Mouse’s daughter. The patriarch of the family, a monocled, mustachioed man named Hubert, was living with his wife and his mistress together. And Edith, his wife, had taken in both the children of his mistress and brought them up as her own. Edith was already famous, as she still is today, as E. Nesbit, the great children’s author who gave the world The Treasure Seekers, The Wouldbegoods, Five Children and It, The Railway Children and many other wonderful stories. Some say she invented the modern children’s novel. When Fabian died, she was forty-two, a striking woman much addicted to long silk dresses and silver bangles. As the child’s name suggests, she was a fervent socialist, one of the founder members of the Fabian Society. Known to her family as Daisy, she had grown up in a rambling, insecure family. Her father had died before she knew him and her mother had taken the children from place to place, through France and Germany as well as England, and from school to school. Daisy emerged as a wilful, sharp, impetuous girl who was soon earning small amounts of cash supplying poems and sentimental stories to the booming magazine market of Fleet Street. She fell for a dashing businessman and sometime writer called Hubert Bland. He had promised to marry someone else, but failed to tell Daisy. When she was seven months pregnant he married her instead, and she decided to make friends with her rival. It would be the start of a pattern. The contradictions of hippie living, mixing politics and sex, high theory and low practice, were known well before the 1960s. Hubert and Daisy began married life with little money. His brush-making firm, in the hard climate of the 1880s, went bust. She was soon producing children and also helping to keep them afloat through her writing–until slowly he too became a successful journalist. She was unconventional from the start, hacking off her long Victorian hair into a tomboyish crop, refusing to wear the tight corsets and flounces of fashion and smoking cigarettes and cigars in public. It was the first flowering of socialist thought, and Daisy would spend days in the British Museum reading room, working at her stories. Among the friends she made were Annie Besant, who was living with the notorious atheist Charles Bradlaugh. They had gone round the country lecturing on birth control and she had lost custody of her children because of it. Besant would lead the famous strike of the London match girls and was a driving force among Fabian socialists before defecting to the limp mystical creed of Theosophy. Another of Daisy’s new friends was Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl. She had nursed him, helped finish Das Kapital and then thrown herself into socialist politics. She lived with Edward Aveling, another socialist, in what the Victorians would call ‘sin’. Aveling married an actress without telling Eleanor and then proposed a joint suicide pact, leaving her with the prussic acid. Eleanor killed herself while he quietly left, very much alive. Which was a sin. This is a suburb of English life full of idealistic but badly behaved men and strong but tormented women. Hubert was an insatiable sexual predator and Daisy responded to his multiple infidelities by taking many lovers of her own, including George Bernard Shaw and a string of devoted younger men. When Shaw was approached by Edith Nesbit’s first biographer, his secretary replied for him: ‘Mr Bernard Shaw desires me to say that as Edith was an audaciously unconventional lady and Hubert an exceedingly unfaithful husband, he does not see how a presentable biography is possible as yet; and he has nothing to contribute to a mere whitewashing operation.’ Hubert may have been behaving in a traditional male fashion, like so many other Victorian and Edwardian males from Edward VII to Lloyd George, but Edith, or Daisy, was struggling to find what life as a freer, more independent woman might mean. How should women conduct themselves in this in-between world of traditionalist and voracious men and a glimmering new idea of freer relations outside the confines of unhappy marriage? It was a real dilemma. At the top end of the social scale, adulteries were so frequent they were taken for granted by the hostesses organizing country-house weekends. Among working-class families, as Rowntree, Booth and others had shown, huge numbers of children were born out of wedlock, often to mothers unsure of the father’s identity. The middle classes, pressed by both sides, hung on all the more doggedly to notions of respectability, casting adulterers and unmarried mothers into social darkness. One way of approaching the dilemma was to ask whether divorce should be allowed without disgrace, thus at least freeing some men and women from relationships they had come to loathe. In 1890 the second Earl Russell had married a woman called Mabel Scott but the marriage had not worked and she returned to live with her mother. Ten years on he went to Nevada, the only place he could get a divorce, and then remarried. This was illegal in Britain, and in 1901 he was tried and imprisoned for bigamy. Out of this and his moving defence of his position came the Divorce Law Reform Association of 1903 and a Royal Commission in 1909. The commission even included some women, despite the protests of the King, who complained that this was ‘not a subject upon which women’s opinions can be conveniently expressed’. Arnold Bennett’s novel Whom God Hath Joined in 1915 dealt directly with the misery of unhappy marriage and the dangers of the divorce court: ‘It was the most ordinary thing on earth! Two people had cared for each other and had ceased to care for each other, and a third person had come between them. Why not, since they had ceased to care?’ The novel reaches its climax in the gloomy Divorce Court on the Strand: ‘And gradually the secret imperious attraction of the Divorce Court [to bystanders] grew clearer to the disgusted and frightened Laurence . . . Here it was frankly admitted that a man was always “after” some woman and that the woman is also running away while looking behind her, until she stumbles and is caught . . . All the hidden shames were exposed to view, a feast for avid eyes. The animal in every individual could lick its chops and thrill with pleasure.’ 

Two others stuck in failing marriages were Tolstoy’s dashing, bearded translator Aylmer Maude and the married woman in whose house he was lodging, a striking thirty-three-year-old biologist. She had been the youngest Doctor of Science in Britain and suffered an intense, failed love affair with a Japanese scientist while she was studying in Germany. Now she was married to a rage-prone Canadian geneticist who was entirely impotent. She was desperate to escape into Aylmer Maude’s arms but, like Lord Russell, found it impossible to get a divorce. Like so many women, including her own mother, she had married with very little knowledge of sex. She was genuinely puzzled about what was wrong. And so one morning, in the best scientific spirit, she marched into the British Museum reading room and asked for every explicit book on sex they had. For six months Dr Marie Stopes sat there working her way through sexual treatises and manuals in English, French and German, including at least one kept locked in the cupboard of pornography. Most useful of all were Havelock Ellis’s sexual studies, which had been published between 1894 and 1910 but were only available to most men (never mind women) with the help of a doctor or lawyer’s certificate. Ellis believed it was time to stop thinking of women as somewhere between angel and idiot, and for men to work to understand their partners’ sexual needs. The vagina was like a lock which required the right moment, the best conditions and some skill to enter: ‘The grossest brutality may be, and not infrequently is, exercised in all innocence by an ignorant husband who simply believes that he is performing his “marital duties”.’ Slowly Stopes accumulated the knowledge she needed to divorce her husband on the grounds of ‘nullity’. But as she returned from her library sessions and teaching job at London’s University College, he would be waiting to abuse and taunt her. She said she felt as if she was drowning in sewer filth, had a permanent headache and was thinking of suicide.26 Eventually Marie Stopes would get her divorce, though only after further horrible rows and a physical retreat from London–the outbreak of war found her living in a tent on a beach in Northumberland, where she was suspected by local militia of being a spy. But the real fruit of her personal search would be a book, Married Love, which was not published until 1918. By then she had met the American birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger. A virgin, Stopes knew very little about the practicalities of this and the two women, after meeting at the Fabian Hall, sat down over a supper of roast lamb to discuss condoms. Stopes would become the great liberator for innumerable women, though she fell out with Sanger. Her later views would become odder and odder, but Married Love fired the imagination of people who felt trapped in sexless or joyless situations. It was hailed by suffragette leaders who wanted to push women’s liberation beyond the vote. In private letters and public campaigns, novels and scandalized newspaper articles, there was a rising debate about sexuality and gender. It was still a debate at the edges of society, and under its surface. Even most Fabians maintained highly respectable and conventional marriages. The darkest secrets of Edwardian family life, the beating of women by drunken or simply violent husbands, rape, and the unconsummated marriages of homosexual men, were never publicly discussed and only emerge as knowing hints in letters and memoirs. But the arrival of more women in the workforce, and a greater understanding of human biology, were facts which could not be brushed away. The socialism of those days was one which relied wholly on future visions and dreams, not on any established model. Fiction was essential to it. H. G. Wells set his science fiction tales in places like Woking. He wrote fantasies but it was fantasy about the future, with its boots on the dust and pavements of Edwardian England. Bubbling under was sexual fantasy. Wells was a keen Fabian socialist and soon frequently visiting the Nesbit–Bland household in Eltham. Just as sexually predatory as Hubert Bland had been, Wells began an affair with Rosamund, Bland’s daughter by Mouse who had learned of her true origins on that dreadful day eight years earlier. She and Wells ran off together, Rosamund reportedly dressed as a boy, but were caught at Paddington station by Bland, who pulled Wells off the train and thumped him. The row that followed, when Wells was already fighting with the other Fabians about politics, was sensational. Wells suggested that he was saving Rosamund from the unfatherly attentions of her father: ‘I conceived a great disapproval of incest, and an urgent desire to put Rosamund beyond its reach in the most effective manner possible, by absorbing her myself.’ Nesbit and Bland, he told Bernard Shaw, oversaw an ‘infernal household of lies’. And when Shaw tried vainly to make peace between the warring parties, he received a double barrel-load of H. G. Wells’s invective at its most entertaining. The more he thought about Shaw, the more it comes home to me what an unmitigated middle Victorian ass you are. You play about with ideas like a daring garrulous maiden aunt but when it comes to an affair like the Bland affair you show the conscious gentility and judgement of a hen . . . The fact is you’re a flimsy intellectual, acquisitive of mind, adrift and chattering brightly in a world you don’t understand. You don’t know, as I do, in blood and substance, lust, failure, shame, hate, love and creative passion . . . Now go on being amusing.27 Abominably though Wells had behaved, it is hard to deny that he had a point. Yet the clotted story of male predation among the idealists, vegetarians and socialists was only just beginning. The great contemporary novel of the suffragette age was Wells’s Ann Veronica, the story of a frustrated, clever young woman scientist who runs away from her father and suburban home to try to live freely by herself in London. She pitches herself into the world of predatory men–one of them suspiciously like Hubert Bland–and militant women which Wells, the author, knew all too well. The near impossibility of women surviving independently in Edwardian London, finding work and supporting themselves without being menaced and insulted, is eloquently explained. And Wells’s satirical take on the Fabian-and-friends crowd is unsparing. The Goopes, for example, are not just vegetarian but fruitarian. Mrs Goopes, childless and servantless (itself evidence of eccentricity in 1909), writes for a journal called New Ideas on ‘vegetarian cookery, vivisection, degeneration, the lacteal secretion, appendicitis and the Higher Thought generally . . . Their very furniture had mysteriously a high-browed quality.’ But Ann Veronica was an easily identifiable fictional portrait of a real-life woman, Amber Reeves–Wells’s latest conquest–a dark-haired and brilliant beauty in her late teens known as ‘the Medusa’, a socialist economist and philosopher. Her affair with Wells included a vigorous session in the open air when they apparently lay under a tree on a copy of The Times newspaper featuring an attack on modern immorality by the popular novelist Mrs Humphry Ward. Others say the naked buttocks pressed against Mrs Ward’s prose were in fact those of Elizabeth von Arnim, another Wells lover. Just to complicate things hideously, Mrs Ward’s attack in the newspaper had been aimed at Rebecca West . . . who would herself later become another lover of Wells.28 Amber became pregnant with Wells’s child. Another of her admirers agreed to marry her to save her from disgrace. Something strikingly similar would happen later with Rebecca West. (Amber, Elizabeth and Rebecca all became novelists too.) The similarities with Nesbit and Bland’s ménage earlier are too close for comfort. Edith Nesbit had chosen love affairs and heroic tolerance as her way out. Others made unhappy marriages to keep their respectability. These are the real stories behind some of the cascade of great children’s story-telling. Most were bland school romps but the best reflected much more. In The Railway Children of 1906, not only is the father absent, wrongly imprisoned, and the mother struggling to pay the bills by hack journalism, just like Nesbit, but a runaway Russian socialist appears, rather like the extraordinary Prince Kropotkin, who was a family friend. In Five Children and It, which Nesbit published in 1902, there are references, albeit joking, to the Fabians’ agenda. The It of the title, a prehistoric sand fairy who can grant wishes, begs the children not to reveal its existence to adults because ‘they’d ask for a graduated income-tax, and old-age pensions and manhood suffrage, and free secondary education, and dull things like that; and get them, and keep them, and the whole world would be turned topsy-turvy’. In The Amulet of 1906 the Queen of Babylon is transported to Edward VII’s London and complains about the wretched and neglected condition of the slaves in east London’s Mile End Road: ‘You’ll have a revolt of your slaves if you’re not careful.’ In the writings of Nesbit and others, the possibilities of fantasy, magic and childlike wonder arrest the attention because adult life around them is dangerous and unpredictable, unfair and often broken. Children become clear-eyed observers of the failures of the adult world. We cannot begin to understand the Edwardian age unless we see it partly through the eyes of children, and then through the eyes of some of the extraordinary, tough, self-confident women challenging the male hierarchies. It was hardly surprising, perhaps, that some of them became men haters. In Ann Veronica, the militant suffragette activist Miss Miniver is a vinegary, anti-sex creature who believes men are beasts and that maternity has been women’s undoing: ‘While we were minding the children they stole our rights and liberties. The children made us slaves, and the men took advantage of it . . . Originally in the first animals there were no males, none at all. It has been proved. Then they appear among the lower things . . . among crustaceans and things just as little creatures, ever so inferior to the females. Mere hangers-on.’ Though the libidinous Wells supported votes for women, you can hear the grinding axe of the sex war. In fact, he was barely exaggerating. The suffragette Frances Swiney believed that male sperm was toxic and male sexual desire was ‘a pathological excrescence–not a natural impulse’. The League of Isis argued that women should have intercourse only for reproductive purposes, once every four or five years. Christabel Pankhurst herself came to believe that up to 80 per cent of the male population was riddled with gonorrhoea and had to be restrained– her 1913 book on the subject was titled The Great Scourge. There was a lot of anger in domestic Edwardian life. 

Rebel Girls