The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

WOMEN’S FRIENDSHIPS AND LESBIANISM
emotional attachment to women: ‘But love between two girls
was silly sentiment. By loving Clare, Muriel knew that she had
been guilty of extreme foolishness. And she wanted so much to
be good.’ 51
Muriel continues throughout the novel to be unable to develop
any strong involvement with men. At the end she is rescued
from her family and sterile spinsterhood by what is portrayed
as simply a friendship with another woman, based on practical
arrangements. Muriel moves to London to keep house for Delia
and the novel ends with both women engaged on fulfilling
political careers.
Both novels depict passionate friendships between women
and give some indication of how social attitudes were beginning
to change. What is significant about both of them is the absence
of a lesbian stereotype, and in Hall’s novel in particular, the
‘innocent’ pleasure of the relationship between Joan and
Elizabeth. Holtby’s novel is directly related to what was
happening in the world outside the novels. Holtby acknowledges
in the introduction to the book that the relationship between
Muriel and Delia reflects her own relationship with Vera Brittain,
with whom she lived for several years. It is clear from Vera
Brittain’s account of her friendship with Holtby that Winifred
loved her very much and was desolated by Vera’s marriage. 52
Holtby’s feelings about Vera are made clear in the letter she
sent shortly after Vera’s marriage in 1924:
I am happy. In a way I suppose I miss you but that does not
make me less happy…. I find you in all small and lovely
things; in the little fishes like flames in the green water, in
the furred and stupid softness of bumble-bees fat as laughter,
in all the chiming radiance of warmth and light and scent in
the summer garden…. When a person that one loves is in the
world, then to miss them is only a new flavour, a salt
sharpness in experience. It is when the beloved is unhappy
or maimed or troubled that one misses with pain. But even
pain is perhaps not wholly undesirable. 53
In her book Testament of Friendship, which she wrote after
Holtby’s untimely death, Vera Brittain sets out to stress the
importance and intensity of her relationship with Winifred.
Because of the suspicions which had accumulated by the time
of writing (1940) around the whole idea of women’s friendships,
she finds it necessary to deny quite explicitly that she and
Winifred were involved in a lesbian relationship:
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