In the mid-1920s the British feminist Maude Royden (1876-1956) was probably the most famous woman in the English-speaking world. She toured the United States, Australia and New Zealand, giving speeches on modern topics such as gender politics and sex to crowded theaters, town halls and churches. Her books, such as Sex and Common Sense (1922) and Beauty and Religion (1923) stimulated discussion and controversy, and her radical religious and political positions, such as her pacifism and her advocacy for women priests in the Anglican Church, reached a wide audience of interested – sometimes shocked – people throughout Britain, the British Empire and the United States. Along with the likes of the Christabel Pankhurst and Eleanor Rathbone, she was one of the main British feminists of the interwar era.
Born in Liverpool with a hip problem that was treated poorly in her youth by medical experts who were less than competent, Royden limped throughout her life. Petite, with short, dark hair and a strong voice, she was able to command the attention of large audiences on her tours and at the London Guildhall non-denominational congregation that she led (her attempts to preach to a mixed-sex Anglican congregation were hindered by a local bishop who questioned the propriety of a women preaching). Eventually, she broke with other pacifists to support Britain’s participation in the Second World War, because she believed Nazism to be a greater evil than war.
Hers was an active life, and I can’t relate more than fraction of her works. What I want to talk about today has little to do with these. Behind her public reputation, fame and honor lurked a private, bittersweet struggle. For most of her life, she was in love with a married man. She met the Reverend Hudson Shaw in 1902 when he invited her to help him in his parish, and to live with him and his wife, Effie. A deep mutual love grew from the three years they spent together working on Anglican parish-y things, a love that was complicated by Effie, whom they both also loved. Effie was fragile, and in some ways Maude’s presence allowed Howard to share the emotional burden of supporting his wife.
Theirs was a passionate love, yet it was also faithful and, up to Effie’s death, entirely platonic. Maude’s autobiographical memoir of the relationship between the three people – A Threefold Cord (1947) – was controversial at the time because of its revelation of the depth and age of Maude and Howard’s love, and also for its sympathetic but honest portrayal of Effie’s mental instability and frigidity. It is an inspiring love story because somehow the two – no, three – people managed to remain true to each other and to themselves, defying both temptation and social convention about how people in that situation ought to behave, and how they ought to treat one another.
We are bombarded with images and messages about the impossibility of chastity, and tend to make assumption about relationships – historical and present-day – that two people who love one another cannot bear to go without sex. Unless there is something wrong with them. This is simply not the case. People’s ideals can hold in the face of emotion, and even if they were anachronistic, we should admire those who are able to live up to the ideals they expected from themselves. It is terribly sad that Maude and Howard could not be together for forty years, but that sadness is tinged with nobility. To me, their lives and struggles are all the more romantic for their staunchness and craziness in staying both together in a platonic, active friendship, yet apart from where they really wanted to be.
Effie died in 1944 and Howard and Maude married eight months later. The night of their marriage, Howard, aged eighty-five, almost died, his heart scarcely able to bear the joy of the realization of a relationship that had sustained him spiritually for so long. He died two months later. It would be base to speculate about the exact nature of what went on on their wedding night, but I do hope that after their decades of distant passion they found consummation at last that night.
Source: Maude Royden, A Threefold Cord (London: Gollancz, 1947)