11

Freewoman

London, 1911–1913

WHEN KATHARINE RETURNED to London in 1911, the city ‘was full of interest: the suffrage movement in full swing’.¹ In an interview for her eightieth birthday, she said that she had ‘always resented the separation of women’s interests from those of men’.² It was a conviction that developed during this second stint in London when she was most involved with feminist circles.

The first sighting of her is in a list of names of Australian suffragettes who marched in the Women’s Coronation Procession in June 1911, five days ahead of George V’s coronation. Forty-thousand women marched through the city that day demanding the right to vote, the largest of the British suffragette marches.³ The marchers left from the Embankment at 5.30 p.m., five abreast, the column stretching 9 kilometres as they moved towards a mass meeting at Albert Hall. The banner carried by Katharine and the rest of the Australian contingent depicted Australia as a daughter saying to Britannia, ‘Trust the women Mother as I have done’.

Katharine joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, but she wasn’t an active member. The organisation was riven by internal conflict. Even for men in Britain the vote was limited by a property qualification, requiring them to own or lease property of a certain value; the WSPU under the Pankhursts had been pushing for the women’s vote on the same terms. A wealthy donor couple, Emmeline and Frederick Petherick-Lawrence, wanted the group to campaign for the vote for all adults and opposed the use of violence.⁴ ‘Whether you were a Peth or a Pank became the burning question’, Katharine wrote, declaring, ‘I was a Peth’. It was a refusal to separate the interests of working-class men from those of women. In October 1912 the Pankhursts expelled the Petherick-Lawrences from the WSPU.⁵

At one point while staying with her mother’s cousin in Huntingdonshire, Katharine debated the topic of the influence of women on history at the conservative Primrose League. Her opponent focused on the ‘disastrous effect women had had on national affairs’ as mistresses of kings and leaders. As the mistress of an influential man, Katharine may have taken the claim personally. She stood on the platform, ‘quivering with nervousness’ but ‘so indignant at some of the things the first speaker had said that I forgot everything except the need to defend womanhood suffrage’.⁶

Katharine was passionate about women’s suffrage, even if she didn’t dedicate her life to it like her fellow Australians Muriel Matters and Vida Goldstein, both in London at this time. She was still searching for the cause she would commit everything to, something which could make sense of the world and its problems.

HOUSING WAS A problem, just as it had been her first time in London. She ‘found a room in an old house at World’s End … [but] I could not get accustomed to the noise, nor to the stench of a poverty-stricken area: damp, decaying houses, urinous walls, accumulated filth in drains and rubbish bins on the pavement’.⁷ She couldn’t sleep or eat. Despite her ideals, she was too sensitive to endure life in a slum. Her old friend Robbie rescued her and helped her find a basement flat in a complex called Chelsea Gardens, at the more genteel end of Chelsea. ‘For several months, I lived and worked quite happily there beneath the pavement, with nothing but the feet of passers-by to see from my windows.’ She was glad, though, to escape the ‘dungeon’ and be offered an upstairs flat. ‘I soared to it, up six flights of stairs, with all my goods and chattels. How I loved that flat … It was a heavenly spot, within walking distance of Fleet Street, so quiet and restful, yet part of the great whirling life of London.’⁸ Katharine was in the right place. Chelsea had a ‘comfortable, Bohemian atmosphere’; a newspaper reported ‘quite a little colony of Australians have congregated in this artistic centre’.⁹

It was even harder than she expected to make a living as a freelance journalist. ‘Manuscripts kept on returning with “editor regrets” slips, day after day, week after week.’¹⁰ The clippings she saved from her London journalism do not include any dated 1911. Her article ‘Australia’s Lesson: On Woman’s Suffrage’ appeared in the third ever issue of London’s labour-movement newspaper, Daily Herald, on 17 April 1912.

Katharine was eventually desperate enough to apply for staff positions, a step backward. Freelancing gave her the flexibility to write creatively; a staff position like the one she’d held in Melbourne would leave her drained of time and energy. As it turned out, she wasn’t able to get one anyway, meaning she was stuck with her original plan to try to make a living as a freelancer.

There were many other Australian journalists in a similar situation in London. A correspondent to Sydney’s Truth wrote that year:

Into this stinking pit of corruption Australian and New Zealand pressmen, journalists, writers (self-styled), and scribblers of all sorts drop under the astounding delusion that London ‘wants’ their sort, and that they can easily gather a fortune by their pens in a few years … Instead of gathering a fortune … it takes him all his time wandering round and round the pit snatching up a scanty living of tit-bits and scrag-ends, over which he and his fellow Australians quarrel as fiercely as any vagrant curs fighting over a bit of rotten meat.¹¹

The correspondent mentioned that ‘the latest arrival, whose descent caused quite a small stir in the Fleet Street pit, is Melbourne Herald’s own drapery “Major” [sic] Reay, who has opened an office in Fleet Street for that shocking example of Australian journalism, and may be able to throw out a few scraps on his own account for the battlers’. Reay doesn’t seem to have thrown out scraps to Katharine; she had no attributed articles in the Herald and Weekly Times for this period. However, he may have opened doors for her at some London newspapers. All she recorded was that ‘when the Preux Chevalier arrived from Australia, there was a round of theatres and dinners in luxurious hotels’.¹²

Reay had resigned as editor of the Herald and Weekly Times while in Melbourne in March 1911. He came straight back to establish a London office for the newspaper.¹³ His career and his country meant much to him, but he was willing to take a demotion from the job he’d held since 1904 and leave Australia permanently in order to be with Katharine. A newspaper reported that his wife and five daughters were ‘to join him in London, where affairs have decided he shall settle’.¹⁴ By January 1912, they had arrived and the family had taken a house on Grosvenor Road, a kilometre or two from where Katharine was living.¹⁵

Was Katharine trying to escape, as Ric Throssell suggests, only for him to ‘impose’ on her his ‘possessive jealousy … following her across the world’?¹⁶ Perhaps, although her trip to the United States to see him in 1910 suggests reciprocity.

SOMETIMES KATHARINE DIDN’T have enough money to eat properly. During the winter, she would swallow a tablespoon of olive oil each day to prevent herself from getting too thin. ‘At first it made me feel rather sick, but after a while I got quite to like it.’¹⁷ Thomas Carlyle had lived on porridge when a struggling writer; she decided she would try it too. She became ill, and a doctor prescribed a proper diet and a stay in the country.

She went to live for two or three months with her mother’s cousin, James Fraser, and his wife, Cissy, in their mansion, the Elms, in Houghton, Huntingdonshire. ‘Although they disapproved of my independence, unconventional ways and radical views, they always treated me like a prodigal child and welcomed me with warm affection.’¹⁸

The Frasers had no children and James ‘offered to make me his heir if I would regard writing more or less as a hobby, and give up my independent way of thinking and living. I wasn’t even tempted.’¹⁹ She seems to have been at least a little tempted, eating well, writing in a room set aside for her as ‘Kattie’s study’, with cherry brandy served at eleven in the morning. ‘I could have had a dolce far niente [“sweetly idle”] existence in this stately old mansion, and in the garden and woods surrounding, if only I had been content not to worry about my conflict with London.’²⁰ She came to see the tranquillity as an illusion. Agricultural workers were badly paid and couldn’t afford meat: ‘the contrasts between wealth and poverty were as disturbing here as in the slums of London’.²¹

KATHARINE WAS IN the midst of intellectual ferment in these years. She was drawn to politics, but in her account in Why I am a Communist (1956), she was also considering religious and supernatural systems of belief:

I discovered the Fabian Society … Guild Socialism, Syndicalism and the Anarchism of Kropotkin. My philosophical reading led me from Christianity to Rationalism, from Plato, Socrates and Epictetus to Buddhism, Theosophy and Christian Science. For ten years I studied these theories, taking each one in turn, discussing them with all manner of people, but committed to none, never a member of any organisation; still not satisfied that I had found the answer to the questions my mind was asking—still not convinced that any of them offered logical solutions to the problem of how the poverty and injustices suffered by so many innocent people could be prevented.²²

It is apt that Katharine had a number of articles published in the Daily Herald, as its outlook on the world was similar to hers. It was radical and committed to reforms in the direction of socialism, as well as strongly pro-suffragette. But rather than become the mouthpiece of a particular party or organisation, it maintained political independence out of the conviction ‘that contemporary unrest demanded a forum-style newspaper to debate the various issues raised’.²³ In this period before the shock of the Great War and the Russian Revolution, there was much ‘cross-fertilisation of ideas and interconnection of personnel in debate and action’ within radical circles.²⁴

In November 1911, the first issue of the feminist journal The Freewoman appeared. The editor, Dora Marsden, had left the Women’s Social and Political Union as she had become ‘virulently opposed to a feminism which concentrated solely on the vote’. The Freewoman featured articles on various women’s issues but frequently—and controversially—on sex.

Katharine had a letter published in the journal on 2 May 1912 while the world was still in shock about the Titanic disaster of a couple of weeks earlier. She felt, rather selflessly, that the push for women’s equality called for a new chivalry from women: ‘a man with responsibilities upon him, the responsibilities of providing for a wife and brood of little ones, has more right to a seat in a lifeboat, if seats are few, than any childless woman, be she maiden, widow, or wife’.²⁵

On a Wednesday night a week later, the Freewoman Discussion Circle held its first meeting to continue the conversations begun in the journal.²⁶ Katharine joined the group and ‘heard there that “marriage is a bargain in which a woman sells out all sexual rights in herself”’.²⁷ Yet if she felt comparatively free in her arrangement with Reay, she was shutting her eyes to how controlling he was. Late in life, she wrote to her granddaughter, ‘A love affair that’s restricting inhibits you when you’re young [and] is worse than marriage, really. There’s no end of unhappiness, quarrels and misunderstandings when jealousy not love is the motive of demands on your every action and thought’.²⁸

In the journal and the discussion circle, Dora Marsden and those drawn to her were moving past the prevailing feminist concern with protecting women from unwanted sex and ‘beginning to claim the right to be sexual’.²⁹ Katharine’s poem ‘Lips of My Love’ goes some way to claiming this right, revelling in sexual desire and pleasure, even though it casts the man as active and the woman as passive. Published in 1914, it was possibly written in 1912 or 1913 while she was a part of the discussion circle and may owe some of its sexual frankness to her immersion in this milieu.

In September 1912, Katharine wrote to Dora Marsden, saying that her ‘sympathies are very much with The Freewoman’. She would like to submit more writing to the journal, but a sketch accepted for publication months ago had still not appeared and she had come by the office several times only to find it closed.³⁰ The reason soon became apparent—due to lack of finances, Marsden published the final issue of The Freewoman a couple of weeks later.³¹ The discussion circle continued meeting but Katharine stopped going.

KATHARINE’S MOST SIGNIFICANT friendship in this period was with a fellow Australian writer, Helena Sumner Locke, always known as Sumner. Sumner arrived in London in May 1912, but they’d already met in 1907 at the Native Companion office. Sumner had been sub-editor to EJ Brady, ‘an elfish-looking little girl then, very slight and sprightly, with big, beautiful eyes’.³²

Sumner was energetic and dedicated to writing. ‘She usually wrote about 4000 words a day, and was ready for a jaunt, or party, or expedition of some sort in the late afternoon. She could write anyhow and anywhere.’ They were ‘comrades-in-arms’, two talented women who were determined that they would be the ones to make the ‘long-long climb’ to the top of the literary ladder. At this point in their careers, Sumner was the more successful, with a best-selling humorous tale of the bush, Mum Dawson, ‘Boss’ published in 1911 and plays staged in Melbourne and Sydney.³³

One conversation was to stand out in Katharine’s memory. Sumner ‘sat curled up on the sofa of my rooms in Chelsea, laughing—the sunshine on her hair, the green boughs of the elms in the garden below flapping behind her in the open window space’. When Sumner said she wouldn’t want to write a book about herself, Katharine said she would write it and promised to give her a happy ending.

The end was to be something like this: You and I—friends of struggling days, all that sort of thing—meet after a long time. You have become the brilliant and successful authoress, are married, have a handsome husband and a beautiful home. And you say to me, ‘Come home and hear my masterpiece?’ I go with you, but you will not tell me anything about the masterpiece—the plot, or characters, or where it is laid, or anything. ‘It must speak for itself,’ you say. Then in the garden of that beautiful home, overlooking the harbour, of course, we hear a baby yelling for his evening meal. And you stop and say to me, ‘Hear him? That’s my masterpiece!’³⁴

As two single women turning thirty—Katharine involved with Reay; Sumner in a long and stalled engagement—they had put their writing ahead of marriage, children and beautiful houses by the harbour. Yet for Katharine to imagine this ‘happy ending’ for them suggests they still aspired to these things. In September 1930 when Katharine’s son was eight and Sumner’s son was twelve, Katharine wrote to Sumner’s sister, saying, ‘I suppose the two lads will meet some day and compare notes. But of the dreams and troubled way-faring of their mothers, that went to the making of the young men, how much will they ever know?’³⁵

Perhaps taking a cue from Sumner’s success with commercial fiction, Katharine wrote Windlestraws in 1912 or 1913, ‘an attempt to please English publishers’. ³⁶ A forgettable light romance, it only became her second published novel in 1916 because of the success of The Pioneers. Windlestraws presents a fantasy of artistic triumph in London. Gene is an orphan whose dreams of making it in the world of theatre have been dashed. She meets the mysterious Peter and like two pieces of whirling straw attaching to each other, they decide to band together. Peter has written a play and Gene is a performer. They will pretend to be Prince and Princess Varof of Russia and convince a theatre producer, on the strength of their name, to stage Peter’s play with Gene in the lead role. The producers agree on the spot. Gene proves to be a brilliant singer and dancer and the show is a great success. The logic of Windlestraws is that it’s only Britain’s class prejudice which has been holding Gene—and, by extension, Katharine—back.

Katharine’s earlier attempts at long narrative—‘A City Girl in Central Australia’ (1906) and Wild Oats of Han (written 1908)—both had stronger autobiographical elements than Windlestraws. After that, perhaps influenced by O’Dowd’s ‘poet militant’ ideal, she created intentionally didactic, political works in her plays The Burglar (1910), Her Place (c. 1913), and For Instance (c. 1914), the latter two suffragette dramas. In Windlestraws, she struck out in an opposite direction, turning away from both politics and autobiography, only to find writing pure romance for the market was not enough to guarantee success. ‘One can only wonder’, comments the critic Jack Beasley, ‘at the direction her writing may have taken had Windlestraws been a commercial success’.³⁷

Then, in April 1913, Katharine’s first book appeared, a modest, self-published twenty-page pamphlet of poems called Clovelly Verses. She wrote the poems on a visit to the village of Clovelly in Devonshire in the summer of 1912. Decades later, she described it as ‘a first offering to my mother… I had not yet evolved from the “ye” and “thou” of poetical expression. So young and amusing they seem now; but maybe of interest to you as indicating the outlook of the young person before she encountered Marxism—as a key to KSP’.³⁸ They are the sort of poems her genteel, conventional mother appreciated—rhyming, descriptive, safely revelling in the charms of nature:

I love the runes

That the years write on the dunes

And the tunes

That the bee sings

As it swings

O’er the heather.³⁹

Katharine’s lack of creative achievement in this period reflects the priority she had to give to the grind of freelancing. By 1913 she was finally finding success as a journalist; she described the ‘turning of the tide’ after the editor of the Globe accepted a story about osier harvesting on the banks of the Ouse, written while she was staying with the Frasers. That article didn’t actually appear for another year, but the editor asked for a couple more stories and her work was also being accepted by other London newspapers. Ironically, once she’d established herself as a freelancer she was offered a staff position at the Star and Daily Chronicle, but she didn’t need it now.⁴⁰

IN JUNE 1913, Katharine visited Rudolf Broda, the Austrian socialist, in Paris. He’d helped to inspire her political quest seven years earlier and she now had more things than ever to talk to him about. Broda relocated to Switzerland during the war, from where he published a pacifist supplement to his journal.⁴¹ After the war, he and his wife divorced and he emigrated to the United States without her in 1923.⁴² In 1932 he revived his journal after a ten-year hiatus and was teaching at a small college in Ohio when he died, aged just fifty-one.⁴³ Rudolf and his utopian vision of international progress have been forgotten; the Europe he thought was evolving towards justice and peace in 1913 was about to be torn apart. Yet if nothing else, Katharine was to remember his influence for the rest of her life.

ON 15 DECEMBER 1913, Katharine’s best friend Hilda married Louis Esson in a quiet civil ceremony in Melbourne. Christian Jollie Smith was one of the witnesses. The fourth member of the circle of friends from high school days, Nettie Higgins, was now engaged to the writer Vance Palmer.

In London eleven days earlier, Katharine had turned thirty. Time was slipping by; there was a new urgency for a breakthrough, for the big literary success she had spent her twenties dreaming about.