The Children's Book

and dangerous, determined and impeded. They found their situation both frustrating and from time to time wildly comic.

There have, throughout history, been communities of women, from nuns who had taken vows of chastity and sometimes silence, to the women paupers, ruthlessly segregated by the Poor Laws. These women were different. They had asserted their desire—indeed, their need—to use their minds, to understand the nature of things, from mathematical forms to currency and banking, from Greek drama to the history of Europe. This generation, in the first ten years of the twentieth century—was neither as austere nor as single-minded as the pioneers of the 1870s and 1880s. They worked less hard, frequently, and were often more frivolous, as well as more uncertain, in many cases, of what would be the outcome of what they were doing.

And as Virginia Woolf observed, in a book which began as a lecture in that College, they liked each other. They made friends. The friendships were based on things other than sex and shopping, clothes and mating. Or sometimes, most often, they were.

College life had its odd little rituals, in which Dorothy was included. The women lived in comfortable bed-sitting rooms, heated by coal-fires, which were often temperamental and had to be coaxed to burn. There were maids, who carried hot water night and morning, and washed up the china. Shoes were cleaned by a man who collected them. Beds were made, fires were laid. In the early days the College had been left money to provide a lady’s maid for every five young ladies, but the ladies’ maids were not wanted, and the money was used to provide half a pint of sterilised milk each evening for each student. This had led to the custom of giving cocoa parties, often very late at night. Invitations caused anxieties, jealousies, bliss and other emotions. There was a curious custom of “propping”—short for “proposing”—by which one young lady would suggest formally to another that they cease to address each other as Miss Simmonds and Miss Baker and call each other Cicely and Alice. Griselda received many such proposals; Florence, who intimidated people, fewer. Griselda had a distaste for what she called Schwarmerei and attracted a lot of it, with her pale, composed look. She said to Dorothy, on Dorothy’s first evening, that she would find both fiercely independent persons and perpetual schoolgirls in the company, and so it proved.

Dorothy, used to the pressure of laboratory work and demonstrations, was surprised by how much students like Florence and Griselda were left to their own devices. Florence seemed to be largely responsible for her own reading and learning, and had a tutor who barely commented on her essays. Griselda, studying Languages, was better off. She took Dorothy to a lecture by Jane Harrison, the Classics don who was also a public personality, passionate, eccentric, with a reputation outside the College and outside Cambridge. She lectured in the College, dressed in flowing black robes with a shining emerald stole, which she used to gesture with, almost like Loie Fuller, whom she also resembled in her dramatic use of magic lantern slides, made from photographs and drawings of Greek carvings and jars. The lecture was on Ghosts, Sprites and Bogeys. It dealt with Sirens, Snatches and Death-Angels, bird- footed man-eating women and Gorgons with evil eyes. It had the odd effect on Dorothy of making her want to return to the labs, partly at least because Miss Harrison reminded her of her mother. Several of the women, Griselda said, were in love with Miss Harrison, and jostled to sit next to her in Hall. She was said to be a great tutor to those she considered worth her attention.

They walked along the river, and went out in a rowing-boat, Griselda, Florence and Dorothy. They discussed the shape of their lives. Griselda said she half-desired to spend the rest of her life in this College—largely because here she could call her life her own, and do what she wanted to do, which was to think about a kind of German version of what Miss Harrison was doing. She wanted to study the relations between fairytales and religions, find out all the ways in which particular stories—say Cinderella—varied and repeated themselves.

“And for that,” said dark Florence, sitting in the bow of the boat, letting the river run through her fingers—“for that, you would be happy to live on burned legs of lamb with bleeding interiors, and watery prunes, for ever and ever?”

“I don’t want to have a house, and staff, and have to order legs of lamb and prunes, black and watery or not. It’s not enough.”

“But is this enough, all these earnest women, and timid girls and the artifice of a manless world?”

“You needn’t worry,” said Griselda. “You are engaged to be married.” Privately, she was curious about Florence’s capacity to appear to forget this fact. Florence said that that presented its own problems. They drifted on in silence.

“The truth is,” said Florence, “that the women we are—have become—are not fit to do without men, or to live with them, in the world as it was. And if we change, and they don’t, there will be no help for us. We shall be poor monsters, like Viola in Twelfth Night, or Miss Harrison’s harpies and gorgons. Do you not think it might be harmful to ignore the sex instinct? Don’t you think that after twenty years of studying Cinderella you might be seized by the idea of the children you never had?”

“Quite probably,” said Griselda, lifting a dripping oar and suspending it, so that the boat swung in the current. “But after twenty years of childbearing and fever and confinement and being shut in a house I might be seized by the idea of Cinderella.

“You are very quiet, Dorothy. Can you see yourself falling in love, and marrying?”

Dorothy revisited her mental image of Dr. Barty. He had lost much substance whilst she was in Newnham. He had lost, she saw, precisely, sex. All that was left of him was a Cheshire-cat-like smile. She ducked, as the boat slipped under a weeping willow, accompanied by a slip of fallen leaves.

“I think it best to suppose that I shan’t,” she said. “But nobody can tell what will happen to them. Do you think getting the Vote would help?”

“It would remove one of the endless humiliating differences between women and men. It might make it possible—in some new world—for the sexes to talk to each other, like people. At the moment the agitation is just making the women more womanish and the men more grumpy and masculine. Of course we ought to be able to vote. But I don’t know that having the Vote will affect the things that frighten me.” Griselda paused. “Whereas, if I wrote a really good book, that might. Or if you invented a new surgical procedure, or discovered a new drug.”

“Ah,” said Florence, grimly. “A woman has to be extraordinary, she can’t just do things as though she had a right. You have to get better marks than the Senior Wrangler, and still you can’t have a degree.”

Griselda feathered the water, elegantly, and turned the boat, and they went back to tea, and glazed buns, and muffins. Dorothy felt a sudden need for London, and the labs.

In 1906 there was a General Election. There was a Liberal landslide; fifty-three Labour members were elected, of whom twenty-nine were professed socialists. There was a savage and arcane argument about the nature of the House of Lords. John Burns, the working-class man, entered the Cabinet. The bristling, pugnacious Lloyd George was Chancellor of the Exchequer. H. G. Wells, also bristling and pugnacious, joined the Fabian Society, and read them a paper on the Faults of the Fabians. Those Fabians who were children of Fabians formed what became known as the Fabian Nursery, full of forward-looking, idealist young men, and determined young women. Fabian summer camps were instituted, with lectures, discussions, and physical jerks. Dorothy and Griselda occasionally attended the meetings