Mary Wakefield, a highly talented musician from Cumbria, never married and had close friendships with other women – but although the evidence is suggestive, it does not allow us securely to conclude that she was gay, while it raises reflections about LGBTQ+ terms today, and about the language of the past.
An important consideration about LGBTQ+ language today, is not only the sorts of words which people use – such as lesbian, gay, homosexual, bisexual, asexual, queer, pride, transgender, transsexual, or LGBT(Q) – but whether people do in fact choose to use these words. Many do. If you go back in time, however, not only were different words were available, but the different social norms prevailing meant that clear statements of identity are more elusive.
In the late nineteenth century, and in the first part of the twentieth century, it was possible to refer to someone as a sapphist or lesbian, meaning a woman who was attracted to others. Yet, neither word was one which you could say in polite company, without raising eyebrows. At this date, Sapphist, or “saph”, or the adjective, Sapphic, was probably a little more acceptable than lesbian; lesbian was a word which could be found in Havelock Ellis’s study of sexology or in medical literature. Virginia Woolf notes in her diary on the 23rd of October, 1929, on the publication of A Room of One’s Own, that she would be “hinted at for a sapphist”. But this was a note in a personal record, not a public announcement.
“Invert”, a term famously found in Radclyffe Hall’s novel, Well of Loneliness, 1928, with lesbian and transgender associations was technically available, but was in no way a polite or positive word. This is the language of a clinical category, rather than a label which queer women could proudly adopt. Women who liked other women normally chose not to use any such word to convey this aspect of their nature, and that makes it harder to find out who they were!
In the case of Mary Wakefield, we look partly at words, partly at situations, and connections of people. Catherine Maxwell has drawn attention to Mary Wakefield’s close friendship with the actress, Marion Terry (sister of the more famous actress, Ellen Terry).
by Herbert Rose Barraud, published by Eglington & Co
carbon print, published 1891
NPG Ax5513 © National Portrait Gallery, London
The writer, Vernon Lee, who would herself go on to visit Mary Wakefield at the family home in Sedgwick, Kendal, notes that in 1886, Mary Wakefield and Marion Terry are constantly to be found in one another’s company (Maxwell, p.965). Indeed, as Rosa Newmarch, Mary’s biographer points out, Mary’s “acquaintance ripened into life-long ties”. (Newmarch, p.24) Marion Terry seems to have kept her private life successfully private, although she never married, and it is impossible to know from the evidence available, the exact nature of her friendship with Mary Wakefield.
I note here, that Mary Wakefield’s friendship with the novelist, Rhoda Broughton, is worth exploring.
Vernon Lee, the pseudonym of Violet Paget, was a varied writer, of fiction and of non-fiction. She became friendly with Mary Wakefield, when they met in London, in 1882. (Maxwell, p.964) This is of interest, because we know that Vernon Lee had emotional involvements with women, including, particularly, Mary Robinson, and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson.
Vernon Lee visited Mary Wakefield at Mary’s family home in Sedgwick, near Kendal, Cumbria, from late July, over the first part of August, 1886. (Maxwell, pp.965-6). During this time, the women went on long pony and trap drives together through the countryside.
Irene Cooper Willis edited Vernon Lee’s letters, in an edition which was published in 1937. Some of Vernon Lee’s letters give us much fascinating detail about her stay with Mary Wakefield in 1886. I wish to quote at length from one of these letters, because it provides an excellent picture of character and scene. We may here imagine the two women, unaccompanied (except by a pony), ranging over the Cumbrian landscape:
“Dearest Mama. The day before yesterday at ten Miss Wakefield & I started in the pony cart with a gladstone bag, an umbrella & an enormous stick wherewith she ascends these hills; furthermore her sheepdog who always sleeps in her room. We returned here yesterday at three, having gone over about forty miles going & coming. We slept at an inn on Ullswater, which is pretty, but I think uncommonly like most other lakes, as also Windermere where we had lunch yesterday. The prettiest are the tiny lakes in the Kirkstone Pass which we crossed yesterday. The great achievement the day before yesterday was crossing a high hill covered with bog and moorland (what they call a fell here) called Gater garth. There was only a bridle path & not much of that, and the pony, who climbs like a cat, had to be led up & down. We got a haymaker to do the leading up, but the coming down, which is much the worst, was achieved by Miss W. leading the beast by the bridle, with me occasionally to lift the cart over a stone behind. It was a tremendous business & in my eyes quite an adventure, not only because it was so very northern & forlorn up there, scrambling over the big stones & sinking into the wet moss with not a tree visible and a wintry wind blowing, but also because it brings out something odd & picturesque in the character of this fat & lazy singer, who on no account gets up for breakfast, and who, on this sort of occasion shows a strength of pluck like no man I have ever met.” (ed.Cooper Willis, p.227, VL’s letter dated Sedgwick House, Kendal, Aug. 2.)
Again, it is impossible to ascertain the exact nature of the friendship and attraction which Wakefield and Lee felt at this juncture. Making allowances for Vernon Lee’s occasional verbal toughness, Vernon Lee was impressed by the situation and by Mary Wakefield. We don’t have a reverse account, of Vernon Lee by Mary Wakefield, to my knowledge, to hear her view of the friendship, although Rosa Newmarch mentions that Mary Wakefield kept diaries. The women holidayed together with Marion Terry. Maxwell notes that Vernon Lee dedicates a story to Mary Wakefield in 1890.
To my mind, there is something queer about the image of these self-reliant women roaming manfully over the countryside, and in this regard, Rosa Newmarch reports a similar adventurous tale, this time involving Marion Terry, whom I mentioned above. During one of the long drives, on which Marion Terry would accompany Mary when visiting Sedgwick, their horse became very tired, and so Mary proposed a shortcut over some fields. Unfortunately, they “found themselves brought up suddenly by one of those long walls of loose stones” which divide up the land.
Mary acted decisively: “Her decision was characteristic. ‘Take the wall down,’ she said, and hitching up the horse to graze, she and Miss Marion Terry set to work to unbuild the obstacle. The twilight was rapidly drawing on as with aching backs and sore fingers they flung down the heavy slabs of limestone and then arranged them into a kind of ascending and descending causeway over which, in the course of an hour or so, horse and dogcart were piloted in safety.” (Newmarch, p.25)
Sophie Fuller has written on the possible queer links between the composer and songwriter, Maude Valérie White, and Mary Wakefield, who performed in many concerts together. (Fuller, p.89, Newmarch, p.23)
Fuller makes the broader point that the lyrics of many songs of the period were addressed to women, which could cause a frisson when sung by women, and frequently with the female composer accompanying. (Fuller, p.92)
Maude Valérie White
by Herbert Rose Barraud, published by Eglington & Co
carbon print, published 1889
NPG x27374© National Portrait Gallery, London
Rosa Newmarch explains that Mary Wakefield and Maude Valérie White became friends early, in the later 1870s, and indeed, that Maude came often to visit at Sedgwick, “where she had her own particular room in the lower story of the tower”. (Newmarch, p.22) Maude Valérie White wrote some of her best songs there, and was apt to leave “traces of ink on other surfaces than that of her music paper”. (Newmarch, pp.22-3) This certainly suggests cosy intimacy as well as professional collaboration. Again, Maude Valérie White never married, and had close friendships with other women, as well as with Mary Wakefield.
Maude Valérie White, in fact, wrote fulsomely and sensitively about Mary Wakefield, in Friends and Memories, 1914. She says, “I certainly spent some of the pleasantest hours of my life in the tower situated at the top of the house. Mary’s ‘den’ was in this tower, and a more attractive, a more fascinating little room I have never seen.” She affectionately describes Mary’s octagonal room with its cultured belongings, and exclaims at its “extraordinary attraction”; she continues, “I alway felt that Mary Wakefield possessed that magic key, that she realised more than any human being I have ever met the inexhaustible treasures that literally lie at our feet if we remove the scales from our eyes”. (pp.187-8)
Mary Wakefield also numbered Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin among her friends. Clearly, the word “friend” sometimes has to do a lot of work, and I believe that we need more evidence to understand properly the nature of the friendship between Mary Wakefield and Maude Valérie White. I do find Sophie Fuller’s discussion cumulatively intriguing and convincing, though.
In 1895, Mary Wakefield settled in a house called Nutwood, at Grange-over-Sands, Lancashire with a fine garden, and from which she could see the Cumberland and Westmorland hills. We need to be attentive to both circumstance and language here, and Mary’s near contemporary biographer, Rosa Newmarch, is our best guide. Significantly, Mary “welcomed the idea of sharing the house with a companion who was in every respect congenial to her. Miss Valentine Munro Ferguson, the writer of several works of fiction and some graceful verse, joined her at Nutwood in the spring of 1895. Apart from their mutual interest in art and literature, Miss Ferguson was in delicate health, and Mary soon lavished upon her that maternal, protective tenderness which all her friends felt to be one of the most beautiful qualities in her strong and practical nature.” Mary’s pleasure in the surrounding countryside of North Lonsdale “was doubled when she could share it with a friend”. (Newmarch p.110) Additionally, both women supported the female suffrage movement.
Valentine Munro Ferguson (1864-1897), who was born in Abbotshall, Fife, in fact, dedicated her last novel, Love again – Life again, which she must have written while she was living at Nutwood, to Mary. All this information tells us that the two women, neither of whom married, were living together, and sharing their lives. The word, “companion”, is used, as well as “friend” – it seems to me that Newmarch is alluding delicately to a very close relationship here. Whether or not the word, “partner” is appropriate for us to use of their arrangement today, due to social norms, it would have been quite unthinkable to use this word in the 1890s for a same sex personal relationship.
Sadly, this happy, companionable arrangement did not last very long, because Valentine Munro Ferguson died at Nutwood in 1897, rather over two years after she had moved in with Mary. Of this, Newmarch says,
“The life which the friends enjoyed together at Nutwood”,at Nutwood lasted only until the summer of 1897, when, after six or seven weeks’ acute illness, during the later days of which Mary watched unceasingly by her sick bed, Miss Ferguson died on September 14th. It is needless to touch upon a sorrow to which, even ten years later, Mary Wakefield could hardly endure to allude.” (Newmarch, p.111)
Following this significant relationship and loss, Newmarch tells us that Mary, after a journey to Italy, was now spending her days quietly at Nutwood. But Mary “had the good fortune to meet a new friend and helper in Miss Stella Hamilton, of Windermere. At first Miss Hamilton would come to her on short visits, which gradually became of longer duration, until finally she divided her life fairly evenly between her home and Nutwood, and learnt to help Mary Wakefield better than anyone else could do.” (Newmarch, p.113).
At this time, Stella Lockhart Hamilton (1872-1955), was living her her family home of Oakthorpe, Windermere. She and Mary spent many hours together landscaping the garden at Nutwood. Many of the photos in Rosa Newmarch’s biography, are taken by Stella – as are many photos for Mary Wakefield’s own publication, Cartmel Priory and Stetches of North Lonsdale, 1909. Stella Hamilton and Mary Wakefield must have visited these places and worked on them together. In 1911, after Mary’s death, Stella proposed with others that the Association of Musical Competition Festivals create medals bearing a portrait of Mary, to commemorate her through the movement with which she was so strongly associated. Rosa Newmarch was able to speak to Stella when compiling her memoir. Stella herself never married.
As you can see, the language which we have available to give us clues to Mary Wakefield’s relationships is subtle. None of the language is that of official categories, or of distant reportage. It is the language of close or special friendship, of affection, of devoted attachment, of companionship. It is also the language used by people close to her, who knew her personally, and described her sympathetically. Exactly what Mary’s contemporaries thought about these friendships is hard to determine. However, it it was possible for Mary Wakefield and these other women to choose lives outside of marriage, often lives shared with other women, while using the socially acceptable language of friendship and of companionship.
Acknowledgements:
Rosa Newmarch. Mary Wakefield, a memoir. Kendal: Atkinson & Pollitt, 1912. This is a memoir of Mary Wakefield, by her friend, the musicologist, Rosa Newmarch. This is the key source for Wakefield’s life. You can download a pdf of this publication here,
https://archive.org/details/marywakefieldmem00newmuoft/page/n5/mode/2up
or on The Mary Wakefield Westmorland Festival website. There is a reference copy in the Fred Barnes Collection in Barrow-in-Furness public library; in the Jackson library, in Carlisle public library; and in the reference collection in Kendal public library.
Catherine Maxwell. “Sappho, Mary Wakefield, and Vernon Lee’s ‘a Wicked Voice’.” The Modern Language Review 102.4 (2007): 960-74. Available free by registering with JSTOR. This article first alerted me to the LGBTQ+ connections with Mary Wakefield, and it provides very useful information on Vernon Lee, including the source of Irene Cooper Willis’s edition of Lee’s letters, which I have also consulted.
Irene Cooper Willis. Vernon Lee’s Letters, privately printed, 1937 This brings to life Mary Wakefield’s character and surroundings at Sedgwick, as well as illuminating Vernon Lee.
Sophie Fuller, ‘ Devoted Attention”: Looking for Lesbian Musicians in Fin-de-Siècle Britain’, chapter three, pp.79-101, in Sophie Fuller, and Lloyd Whitesell. Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity. Urbana; [Great Britain]: U of Illinois, 2002 This is a very interesting and suggestive chapter on queer musicians and their networks at the time of Mary Wakefield. It also mentions Newmarch’s discussion of Mary’s friends and companions.
Philip Ross Bullock. Rosa Newmarch and Russian music in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain,Routledge, 2017. Ross Bullock discusses Newmarch in connection with her sensitive delineation of Mary Wakefield and of other women, and also cites Catherine Maxwell and Sophie Fuller. See p.120.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesbian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maude_Valérie_White
The Oxford English Dictionary. Entries on “lesbian”, “sapphist”, and “sapphic”. Like other entries, these are viewable through the number on a Cumbria public library card.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, entry on Marion Terry https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/38758
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, entry on Violet Paget [pseud. Vernon Lee} https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/35361
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, entry on White, Maude Valérie
https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/59603
These biographical entries can be viewed via the number on a Cumbria public library card.
Eds Anne Olivier Bell & Andrew MacNeillie. Virginia Woolf. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, London: Hogarth Press, 1925-1930, vol. III, 1980, p.262
A. M. (Augusta Mary) Wakefield. Cartmel Priory and Sketches of North Lonsdale, Grange-over-Sands: H.T. Mason, 1909 There is a reference copy in the Fred Barnes Collection in Barrow-in-Furness public library; in the Jackson library, in Carlisle public library; in the Local Studies collection in Grange over Sands public library; in the reference collection in Kendal public library; and in the Local History reference collection of Whitehaven Record Office.
Maude Valérie White. Friends and Memories. London: Edward Arnold, 1914 This book, which is a chatty and expressive memoir, mentions Mary Wakefield on many occasions; see, for example, p.147, “I was extremely fond of the whole family – though of course, it was Mary who was my special friend.”
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