Charlotte Mew: and Her Friends. Penelope Fitzgerald

friends. All these girls had good, quiet homes – the Olivers were Quakers – and were not much disposed to question things. Lotti amazed them. They saw at school her wild side, her inquisitive, flamboyant, head-tossing, parasol-snapping side. The beloved headmistress could not be disobeyed, but Lotti seemed to pass her days in a state of painful emotion, as though listening to something they could not hear.

      In 1882, when Lotti was on the verge of adolescence, Miss Harrison, the undisputed centre of life in Gower Street, began to behave oddly. Her behaviour showed signs of overwork and strain. She was becoming what was then called (in reference to schoolmistresses) ‘unhappy’. It was felt by the governors that she must leave the school, and try what a rest would do. She was going, it was decided, to retire for the time being and take rooms in Hampstead, half-way up Haverstock Hill. During the daytime she would work in the British Museum, grimly persevering with her History of England, never, as it turned out, to be published.

      When Charlotte heard this news, she was practising the piano. She sprang up and ‘in a wild state of grief began to bang her head against the wall’. This recollection came from a much younger girl, Amice Macdonnell, a niece of Miss Harrison’s. Amice was dismayed, and wondered whether she ought to bang her head, too.

      Lotti was sick with one of the most cruel of all preparations for adolescence, the passion for a teacher, confusing intense sexual anxiety with the duty of loving the highest when we see it. Wisely or unwisely, Miss Harrison now offered to take some of the older girls from Gower Street as boarders, and to teach them English literature in the evenings, when their school day was over. Anna Maria was quite unable to face such a crisis, Lotti grieved wildly, Fred was called in to make a decision, and to put his foot down, and do something. He was frightened by his daughter’s condition. He is described as ‘going down on his knees’ to persuade Lucy Harrison to take Lotti with her.

      But if he had done the best he knew for Lotti, he can hardly be said to have understood her, for he believed the move would ‘stabilize’ her. For the next two years she was separated from her elder brother and her two sisters, Anne and the baby Freda. Anne continued placidly in the Gower Street junior school, ‘good at art’, giving no trouble of any kind. Miss Harrison’s boarders, on the other hand, had to undertake, twice every day, the three-mile walk to and from Gower Street, down Haverstock Hill and Chalk Farm, through Camden High Street with its markets, down Hampstead Road to school. In the evening the walk was uphill. But Lotti’s spirits were now so high, and she was so unpredictable, so entertaining, seeming sometimes to dance rather than walk, that the way seemed short.

      Two of the Gower Street assistant teachers walked in front, as chaperones. Behind came the two sixteen-year-olds, Edith Oliver and Edith Scull, the daughter of an American professor. The two Ediths, then, walked ahead; next came Lotti, in the highest spirits, with the puzzled little Amice Macdonnell. When the little party arrived at Haverstock Hill there was a gracious reception, but also plain cooking of the cold meat and rice pudding variety. Mrs Newcombe, the Gower Street housekeeper, who regarded Miss Harrison with love and reverence, had come to Hampstead to look after her.

      Eighteen months later, however, the situation totally altered when Miss Harrison herself fell passionately in love with Amy Greener, the teacher who had taken over the Gower Street School. When she recognized that her nerves had given way, Lucy Harrison had bought a piece of land, Cupples Field, near Wensleydale in her native Yorkshire. She had planted trees on the site at once, but waited for the right moment to build herself a house. Now, at one stroke she realized that the house must be shared. All the strength of ‘the fairest hill and sweetest dell’, she wrote to Miss Greener, ‘without you leaves me longing’, and again, in 1886, ‘Oh, for one hour with you again!’ and ‘Dearest, I do not feel at home anywhere without you now … with the person you love comes a halo and glow over everything, however miserable and poor, and without that presence the light seems to leave the sun itself. This is a trite remark, I am afraid.’ As she drove across the rough Yorkshire moors she recalled her walks with Miss Greener in the Tottenham Court Road. ‘Dear, dear love, there is nothing in the world that could satisfy me or fill your place for me, but if separation by death had to come, I think one could fly to the hope and thought of meeting hereafter; it would, I think, be impossible to live without that hope at any rate.…’

      These letters are quoted in Amy Greener’s biography of her friend, which treats a delicate subject delicately. Miss Greener had asked herself whether some people, knowing that the idea of marriage had never attracted Miss Harrison, would wonder ‘whether her life lacked the perfect rounding that love could bring’. ‘Well!’ commented a friend, who had been allowed to read the manuscript, ‘the love she needed came!’ And indeed the two of them were to live in perfect concord at Cupples Field for nearly thirty years. Lucy became the revered headmistress at the Mount School, York; Amy joined her staff. They retired together. On her deathbed Lucy asked Amy to read to her from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Catarina to Camoens, in which Catarina, ‘dying during the poet’s absence abroad’, tries to reconcile herself to the idea of his falling in love again. She wavers, but finally gives her blessing. It must have been painful for Miss Greener to read these words aloud in the whitewashed bedroom, among the plain oak furniture which her friend had knocked together.

      Meanwhile the boarders at Haverstock Hill were left to face their entry into life without their headmistress. It was the end of Lotti’s schooling, and part of her education had been to know what it was to be totally obsessed by the physical presence or absence of another woman. This for her was something more than the ordinary condition of being sixteen. It can be recognized in an early sonnet, Left Behind:

       I wait thy summons on a swaying floor,

       Within a room half darkness and half glare.

       I cannot stir – I cannot find the stair –

       Thrust hands upon my heart –; it clogs my feet,

       As drop by drop it drains. I stand and beat –

       I stand and beat my heart against the door.

      Of course, large numbers of schoolgirls all over England, at the turn of the century, felt passionately about the teacher. Schwärmerei was a calculated risk for those who educated in Lucy Harrison’s way. It passed, and was supposed to refine and ennoble. But for Lotti, the changeling, the odd one out, it proved to be an initiation into her life’s pattern. She would always be physically attracted to women rather than to men, and she would always choose wrong. She was marked out to lose, with too much courage ever to accept it. From adolescence she was one of those whom Colette called ‘restless ghosts, unrecovered from wounds sustained in the past, when they crashed headlong or sidelong against the barrier reef, mysterious and incomprehensible, the human body’.

       CHAPTER THREE Lotti

      LOTTI, everyone said, had changed. She was still unpredictable and passionate and could still, if she wanted to and was in the vein, make everybody laugh until they cried. But the innocent desire to show off had failed her. She was often fierce with strangers. Her wild impulses no longer turned all the same way, outwards, to meet the world. Once she had been driven to wild happiness at any kind of celebration; now, it seemed, she had hardened. ‘It is a legend in my family’, she wrote, ‘that at festive seasons I am cynically indifferent to the pile of good wishes and parcels that come my way – but this may merely be a self-protective mask for the “emotional nature” which you insist on crediting me with … I am credited with a more or less indifferent front to these things – the fact is they cut me to the heart.’ The storm within had to have an outlet. She needed exhausting music, not her piano pieces, but Wagner, Tannhäuser above all. Meanwhile the silver cross round her neck (and the gold one on Sundays) was an outward sign that she had entered an Anglo-Catholic phase, and, with her mother and Anne, was attending Christina Rossetti’s church, Christ Church,