Literature, love and feminism: “PASSIONATE FRIENDS” By Sylvia Martin
by Karen Throssell
Passionate: 1. Capable of having or dominated by powerful emotions
2. Marked by a strong sexual desire, amorous or lustful… (Cambridge Dictionary)
Which definition of this word, and who chooses it, is an important thread that runs through this fascinating and important book.
In Passionate Friends, Sylvia Martin describes her project as “exploring how past women who loved women, might have understood their feelings, what narratives were available to them, and how particular women might have taken up some and resisted others, in order to create their own sense of identity.”
To do this she examines two important friendships in the life of Australian poet Mary Fullerton. One was her literary friendship with Miles Franklin which started in London, where both were expatriate writers in the early 1920s, and continued through 20 years of lively correspondence. The other was her lifelong, loving friendship with Mabel Singleton.
Mary, in her many love poems to Mabel, leaves no doubt about being ‘dominated by powerful emotion’ for her friend. Whilst there is no doubt that today we would describe their relationship as a lesbian relationship, their avoidance, even avid denial of the term, can be best understood in the context of the prevailing social attitudes, including Mary’s strict Presbyterian upbringing.
As Sylvia Martin implies, all three women, by their outspoken feminist activism, had already ‘crossed the line’ in terms of socially acceptable female behaviour, and it seems none of them wanted to cross it further by ‘coming out’ and declaring their definition of ‘passionate’ as the second of the Cambridge dictionary definitions – which would have marked them as ‘foul lesbians’(to use Miles Franklin’s words.) In this period even ‘passionate friendship’ was still unsanctioned and thus suspect.
But it is Mary’s own analysis of her sexuality - as being ‘intermediate’ (in between male and female) that shows how important the current re-publication of this book is, in accommodating contemporary gender narratives, which constructs identity as “shifting and unfixable, and less a new identity than a critique of identity or at least the politics of identity”. Mary’s views on ‘the advanced soul’ were influenced by the sexologist Edward Carpenter who argued that the highest form of love doesn’t have to involve sex, where it is ‘desire in itself that is the goal, rather than its consummation.’ Sylvia implies that this was the narrative that defined Mary Fullerton’s love for Mabel, and whether it was ever consummated, we can never truly know. It fits with Mary’s ‘politics of purity’- which proclaimed the virtues of purity and chastity, held by both Mary and Franklin.
*
As we know poetry is one of the most, if not the most, powerful ways to express love (I confess some bias here). Without a lot of other ‘evidence’, Mary’s poems are skilfully used, and perfectly placed to support Sylvia’s theory of Mary’s passionate love for Mabel – “a love which she saw as the highest form of friendship – akin to heterosexual relationships but without the inherent inequalities”, and maybe as part of her need for invisibility. Thus the 100 or so surviving poems written for Mabel, are very different from the rest of her poetry: highly personal, and generally not intended for publication. Whilst not wanting to critique the poetry as such, I found many of the poems included in the book are incredibly poignant because of this. And although she was prolific, and much of her work would easily compare with writing of the same period, Sylvia Martin also highlights Mary Fullerton’s relative literary invisibility. I thought I knew a bit about Australian Literary history – but who was Mary Fullerton? In doing this Martinis also implying a comparison with the invisibility of her life-long non-platonic relationship.
Of course, it was a period when even Miles Franklin saw it as necessary to become Brent of Bin Bin to try and be published in Australia after My Brilliant Career was published in Edinburgh… The inclusion of the less invisible Miles in the trio of friends adds an extra dimension both to the examination of the invisibility of women writers and their fight to be ‘seen’, but also to the very different identity which Franklin assumed /created as a ‘go-alone’ woman during this fraught period.
In exploring the need for these identities, Sylvia is breaking the mould of many biographers of single women, by not employing the delightfully termed ‘cherchez l’homme’ tactic which assumed that ‘go-alone’ women, as they were termed then, were only lacking the ‘right man’. And whilst I wondered for a while whether she was replacing it with ‘cherchez la femme’, – as in “Mabel’s feelings for Mary remain tantalizingly out of reach…” – this is mitigated for me by Sylvia’s avowed interest in women in general “who choose unorthodox lives – who did not marry or sustained significant friendships with women”.
Through the lives of these three women in Australia, England and the US we see Australian first wave feminism in action, with their connection to Vida Goldstein, through their work for the Women’s Political Association and its newspaper Woman Voter. And, wonderfully, the Women’s Parliament. What fantastic scenes! Feminism in action. What we could do if women ran the world…. When Mary and Mabel travel to England together and separately, they are instantly involved in the suffragette movement there – even being present at the infamous Epsom Derby horse race, where Emily Wilding Davison threw herself under King George’s horse in a desperate bid to publicise the need for women’s suffrage
Of course, being about two writers, the book also powerfully illustrates the very chauvinist Australian literary scene at the time, just what hoops women writers had to go through to get a tiny foot in the door, and the ways in which they worked to help one another overcome the excessively firm grip of the patriarchy. This is beautifully exemplified by the mentorship and mutual support between Miles Franklin and Mary Fullerton. One thing Sylvia doesn’t mention, however, is that Miles’ generosity in supporting her ‘invisible friend’ was just a precursor to her scrimping and saving in order to dedicate the majority of her estate to the establishment of an annual literary award – still one of the most prestigious today – The Miles Franklin award.
I loved this book. It covered so much ground and raised so many questions. Even though the focus was the very important discourse about sexual politics, a topic which is as pertinent now as it was then, it was also about a passionate but private love story, a universal tragedy of historical circumstance and prejudice, wonderfully researched and powerfully told.
It really made me think – primarily about sexuality and how complicated and un-boxable it is, but also about history, and how we need to honour these activists, writers and lovers who never had the opportunities – limited though we think they are – that we have. And to acknowledge their determination to leave their mark on a world which might have wanted their thoughts and passions to remain invisible.
ISBN 9780645183993
Karen Throssell is an award-winning writer and poet with five poetry collections and another book of creative non-fiction. Her poems have been published in a number of anthologies. Her book, The Crime of Not Knowing Your Crime: Ric Throssell against ASIO, was published in 2021 by Interventions.