In 1892, the writer Walter Besant (1836–1901) published the article ‘On collaboration’ for the New Review where he reflected on his collaborations with literary men such as Wilkie Collins (1824–89) and offered suggestions about how others should collaborate in future. Besant largely portrayed collaborations as taking place between men but briefly offered two other possibilities. He firstly recommended engaging a ‘Ghost’, a ‘young lady, clever and unknown’, who could do all the work for her employer before he sent it to the publisher ‘with his name’. Besant also offered a final option ‘which may be recommended very strongly to every young literary workman’. He told readers to look amongst friends and family for a ‘girl’ to marry who would ‘listen to his plot, and discuss his characters…who does not, or cannot, write’. Although Besant had just introduced the woman ‘Ghost’, he now argued ‘Woman does not create, but she receives, moulds, and develops’, and as such was ideally suited to collaboration. One could be ‘most certain’ a wife would never ‘quarrel over her share of the work, her share of the kudos, her share of the pay’.Footnote 1
Besant’s suggestions here are unlikely to cause surprise. The middle-class wife’s historic role as behind-the-scenes ‘helpmate’ who enabled her husband to build his career – through clerical support, hosting soirées, or even as unrecognized author – is acknowledged by scholars in disciplines ranging from literature to philosophy, politics, and history.Footnote 2 In contrast, the small body of research specifically on literary collaborations has largely conceptualized these partnerships as existing between men, although there is a flourishing body of scholarship on women’s entwined literary and intimate collaborations with other women.Footnote 3
However, turning from Besant to consider ‘Wives who work with their husbands’, by writer and actor Rudolph de Cordova (1859–1941) for Woman at Home in 1912, offers a different, little-studied window onto the history of collaborative cultures.Footnote 4 In this article, married couples were described as fully collaborating on professional projects together. Cordova, who himself co-authored plays and filmscripts with Alicia Ramsey (1864–1933), his wife, began reflecting how ‘in the old days, the woman who worked with her head was, undoubtedly, the exception’. ‘Today’, however, ‘women who do what is called “men’s work” in every branch of intellectual endeavour is legion. The natural result is that when they marry the union of hearts often becomes a union of heads and the close companionship between husband and wife is ideally strengthened by their becoming co-workers.’ Cordova enthusiastically rattled off married collaborators in fields including science, medicine, and education but offered the most examples of ‘literary’ ‘co-workers’ who wrote serials and books together, including Alice and Claude Askew (1874–1917 and 1865–1917), Marie Connor Leighton and Robert Leighton (1867–1941 and 1858–1934), A. M. and C. N. Williamson (1858–1933 and 1859–1920), Agnes and Egerton Castle (c. 1860/1–1922 and 1858–1920), and Coralie Stanton (Alice Hosken’s pseudonym) and Heath Hosken (c. 1877–1951 and 1875–1934).Footnote 5
I take Cordova’s remarks as the starting point for this article, which offers the first history to analyse the growing phenomenon of married Anglo-American couples who co-published, c. 1870–1939. Cordova’s piece was one of thousands which appeared across the English-speaking press, especially from the 1890s, lauding the publications – and relationships – of these now largely unknown married literary collaborators. I argue that analysing these histories transforms understanding of the breadth, range, and meaning of collaborative writing cultures, far beyond the limited conceptualization Besant advocated for, and upon which scholars continue to rely. Altogether, my research has found approximately forty-five Anglo-American married couples who co-published as writers (and as writers and illustrators) during this era. My focus is the most celebrated and prolific co-authors, several of whom are introduced above, as they featured most frequently in cultural discourse, but I draw from a range of examples to flesh out this phenomenon.Footnote 6 The vast majority were white, replicating the racialized hierarchy of the English-speaking literary scene.Footnote 7 Ultimately, I argue married collaborators had much wider significance as agents of social and cultural change, at a critical moment in the making of modern society, than has hitherto been recognized.
The lack of consideration of marriage within histories of professional collaborations speaks to the broader, multidisciplinary failure to adequately address married women professionals and their husbands as an historical category for analysis in their own right.Footnote 8 Histories of ‘pioneering’, ‘first-wave’ women who fought for new professional careers routinely suggest – here in a 2015 quote by Gillian Sutherland – that ‘ladies either married or pursued paid employment’ before the Great War.Footnote 9 Indeed, there remains a scholarly understanding that middle-class women’s efforts to marry and pursue paid work (and the widespread societal debates about this) was a phenomenon solely of the post-1945 era. Historians have prioritized working-class women and unmarried middle-class ‘spinsters’, of whom far greater numbers worked. They have cogently evidenced the damaging role marriage had on many women’s careers and their formal exclusion from certain fields through marriage bars.Footnote 10 The vast scholarship on the evolution of ‘companionate marriages’ during this same era has also placed curiously little emphasis on how work shaped decisions about who to marry, the forms these marriages took, and the impact these marriages had on the development of professional society.Footnote 11 In turn, research on the professions has foregrounded institutions and educational opportunities as the key mechanisms for understanding socio-economic change within ‘the workplace’, and has yet to fully unpack the role played by familial bonds and needs in the making of modern professional cultures. Literary scholars, meanwhile, have prioritized the anti-marital rhetoric of ‘New Woman’ novelists, who often portrayed ‘spinsterhood’ as crucial for success, or the lives of mid-nineteenth-century married ‘greats’ such as ‘the Carlyles’, ‘Brownings’, or early-twentieth-century ‘Woolfs’.Footnote 12
The absence of comparative research into the middle-class couples who formed dual-working households from the late nineteenth century is also a consequence of the justified desire to prioritize analysing women’s lives and professional contributions in their own right rather than alongside those of their husbands. This has, however, effaced the perspectives and impact of a growing cluster of – unusually influential – couples who viewed marriage as providing a productive space within which to negotiate new professional opportunities and domestic lives, and who publicized their marital collaborations as fundamental to these new ways of working and living. There was a particular wealth of such collaborations within the arts. These fields tend to be overlooked by historians, despite the fact women flocked to such lesser regulated occupations and, if they married, often chose partners working in similar fields.
Alongside all of this, within the biographical work through which dual-working partnerships have very occasionally been considered, there has been an over-exaggeration of both the ‘radical’ and unique nature of these relationships. Such works foreground individual couples where at least one in the partnership (usually the husband) is deemed to have written works of canonical merit, or social reformers who set out to change the world with their writing.Footnote 13 But alongside not being as unusual as depicted, ‘literary marriages’ were by no means confined to ‘high culture’ or ‘radical’ writing. Indeed, the majority of couples targeted the mass market, publishing popular, often more socially conservative, works, spanning romances, sensation fiction, children’s stories, travel guides, and detective novels, and, as we will see, had a range of views about women’s ‘appropriate’ lifestyles and rights.
This article is divided into three cumulative sections. Part one unveils the breadth, scope, and prevalence of Anglo-American married literary collaborations, arguing these endeavours need to be recognized as a growing phenomenon of the 1870s to the 1930s. It overturns the positioning of literary collaborations as unique to one nation and the portrayal of the early twentieth century as a moment of dwindling interest in collaborative cultures.Footnote 14 By the 1920s, one newspaper described married ‘pen partners’ as so common ‘as to make selection embarrassing’.Footnote 15
Part two illuminates the vibrant cultural discourse which circulated across the English-speaking world about ‘popular’ married couples who published together. From the late nineteenth century, there was unprecedented potential to spread knowledge about these relationships to diverse, ever-more literate, audiences via the rapid expansion of print cultures, through couples’ own publications and across the press. Journalists, somewhat surprisingly, regularly emphasized the desirability of these marriages, the intellectual prowess of both wife and husband, and their ability to create dual-working households where professional triumphs held the key to unlocking fulfilling and harmonious domestic lives. This section elucidates the considerable interest in these ‘celebrity’ couples and their central position amidst debates around gender roles, married life, and ‘brain work’. Despite the scholarship charting the rapid expansion of celebrity cultures at this exact historical moment – and the growing necessity for writers and artists to market themselves accordingly – this phenomenon has been positioned as constituting of public fascination with individual ‘stars’, rather than including couples.Footnote 16 Moreover, by analysing across memoirs, novels, local and national newspapers, the women’s press, travel writing, ‘society’ papers, and literary journals this section moves beyond the tendency to consider marriage solely through the lens of advice literature or by analysing letters between specific couples to assess how cultural scripts pertaining to gender, identity, and agency played out within private relationships. Whatever the everyday ‘reality’ of their ‘private’ relationships (which is not the focus, nor could it be as they rarely left behind papers offering unmediated exploration of their intimate lives), this research illuminates the persistency with which mass-market readerships were confronted with an alternative and compelling public vision where certain middle-class, dual-working marriages could be accepted and indeed extolled.
Part three interrogates the paradoxes permeating the activities and writings of and about the couples whose works and relationships most attracted public interest. In particular, it addresses how they marketed themselves as simultaneously novel and ‘exceptional’, yet also ‘ordinary’, relatable married couples. The most ‘popular’ partnerships defused the radicalism of their undoubtedly progressive dual-working marriages by lacing their writings with public emphasis of their adherence to certain ‘traditional’ gender norms. Invested in carving out and sustaining their own roles in a deeply hierarchical, capitalist world, they remade and propagated certain regressive ideas about gender, class, and racialized difference, in their interviews and in their fiction. As such, married collaborators opened up a pathway which offered greater opportunities for the slowly increasing numbers of predominantly white Anglo-American middle-class women and men who managed to gain access to such lifestyles, but there were contradictions and hypocrisies in how these marriages were portrayed which were never resolved. At the same time, I argue that the very paradoxes in this discourse, and the ways it was saturated, in often humorous and breezy ways across mass popular culture – to be enjoyed as supposedly inconsequential ‘middle brow’ ‘escapism’ – was what made it so important. This facilitated the creation of an imaginative space where ‘ordinary’ readers could explore and self-actualize new perspectives about the ways they, and those around them, might wish to partake in work cultures and intimate relationships in twentieth-century society.
I
From the late nineteenth century onwards, Anglo-American marital ‘literary’ collaborations boomed.Footnote 17 This intersected with a moment when middle-class women increasingly sought self-expression and money-making opportunities within creative professions, attracted by the possibilities in these rapidly expanding and less formally regulated occupations, and the ability to, in theory, maintain respectability by flexibly working at home.
Women were well aware both married and unmarried life would present difficulties to their professional ambitions. Unmarried women faced heightened suspicion and sexualized attention, which made navigating a literary world orientated around homosocial networks and male editors and publishers extremely difficult. Married women professionals, meanwhile, regularly had to navigate greater domestic duties and more interest in their husbands' work than their own. Writer Leonora Blanche Lang (1851–1933), who did much of the work for the renowned Fairy books, ostensibly produced with her husband Andrew Lang (1844–1912) and others, wrote of the inability for married literary women to avoid this fate. Unlike many collaborators in this article, only her husband’s name was printed on the covers of their books, but in her opinion, this would have made little difference. Even if ‘her name, and not his, appears on the title-page of the book, it is he, and not she, who will obtain all the credit and all the praise’.Footnote 18
Still, the fact that when women in the arts married, they often married men working in complementary fields is suggestive of a hope their marriage could allow for, and even facilitate, creative, professional opportunities. Marie Connor Leighton apparently told her fellow author husband: ‘Please remember Robert…I only married you to get away from my own people and write books.’ After marrying in 1889 she wrote every day and evening except for Christmas day. Marital status also equipped Leighton with a ‘mist of romantic inaccessibility’ which enabled her to respectably maintain friendships with ‘eminent’, ‘infatuated’ men.Footnote 19 Writer Elizabeth Robins (1855–1936) and illustrator Joseph Pennell (1857–1926) published together while unmarried in the 1870s, but this became a problem when they wanted to travel for work: ‘probably seeing no alternative, he [Joseph] suggested a life partnership which would enable us henceforward to share not simply Italy’s, but the world’s beauty, at no risk of criticism or gossip’.Footnote 20
Married couples collaborated for several, interconnected, reasons, including the desire for literary ‘success’, the pursuit of new shared lifestyles, but also to quickly make money in conditions of relative penury. Several collaborating couples struggled to keep financially afloat even though they would still routinely be defined as middle class. Robert Pinkerton (1882–1970) held forty-two precarious jobs before marrying Kathrene Gedney (1887–1967). Marriage however, enabled greater options to ‘swing the kind of life we want’. As Kathrene detailed in her memoir – aptly titled Two ends to our shoestring – they ‘got out the typewriter and faithfully followed the recipe…We pooled our ideas and finished the novelette in five days.’Footnote 21 Elsewhere, Coralie Stanton and Heath Hosken started married life together in a boarding house before becoming successful collaborators.Footnote 22
Certain couples began by only listing the husband’s name on their book covers, but from the 1890s there was realization that including both names could provide the unique recipe for literary success in an ever more competitive marketplace.Footnote 23 For Egerton and Agnes Castle’s first ‘four or five books’, they used solely his name ‘because we fancied that they would sell better under a name that was already known’ and out of concern there would be ‘prejudice against what some people will look upon as a divided, instead of a united, authorship’. They experimentally put both names on The pride of Jennico (1898) and ‘its success was so rapid and so wide that it set all misgivings on the score of “collaboration” at rest once and for all’.Footnote 24 By the 1900s, couples would have been well aware of the potential gains from framing their work as co-produced. Indeed, although A. M. and C. N. Williamson used both their names from 1902, Charles does not appear to have done any of the writing, something Alice discussed in her memoir after his death.Footnote 25 Such examples speak to the impossibility of ever fully accounting for how married couples divided their labour, yet what is significant here are the increasing attempts to openly publicize marital literary collaborations at this point.
The 1890s also marked a moment when middle-class marriage was being publicly scrutinized as never before, and debates raged about the horrors of the ‘marriage market’, removal of women’s rights upon marriage, and the scandal of divorce. Lucy Bland has traced the ways certain radical couples started to eschew marital bonds and instead formed ‘free love’ relationships in an attempt to garner greater autonomy.Footnote 26 But it has gone unrecognized that this was the same moment when increasing numbers of middle-class ‘professional’ women and men entered collaborative and dual-working marriages. Such marriages were regularly described as one of ‘comradeship’. Ernest Rhys (1859–1946) used such rhetoric to describe his engagement to fellow writer Grace Little (1865–1929) in the 1890s; this had been the moment when they laid out ‘our great schemes for the future’ believing ‘two companions, working together, can conquer the world’.Footnote 27 Yet despite this, Ernest still wrote later that they had only ‘worked together under the great dome’ at the British Museum when she could ‘escape house and children’.Footnote 28
The forms married collaborations took were eclectic and unique. The focus here is couples who collaborated regularly; some described their partnerships as ‘the firm’ and even co-published after the death of one in the marriage.Footnote 29 But others only published together once or sporadically. Like many married literary couples, Walter Jerrold (1865–1929) prioritized ‘great men’ (his biographies included Earl Kitchener of Khartoum: the story of his life, 1915), while Clara Jerrold (1861–1937, née Bridgeman), writing as ‘Clare Jerrold’, focused on women, most famously her trilogy about Queen Victoria.Footnote 30 After the Great War, they, for reasons unknown, co-authored Five queer women (1929) and a book about the prose and verse of Cumberland (1930).Footnote 31 Certain collaborators used pseudonyms, such as Dorothy Charques (1899–1976) and Richard Derek Charques (1899–1959), who wrote as R. D. Dorthy.Footnote 32 Several published together as a separate project to their work in other professional fields. Between the 1920s and 1940s, Margaret (1893–1980, née Postgate) and George Cole (1889–1959) co-authored over thirty detective and mystery novels while working in socialist politics.Footnote 33 Alongside this, husbands occasionally provided forewords or a frontispiece for their wives, especially when wives were less established.Footnote 34 In turn, wives were more prone to keeping their husbands’ posthumous reputations alive – often to the detriment of their own – penning biographies, editing collections of their work, and depositing curated papers in archival institutions.
It was the commitment married collaborators both had to dedicating time to creative projects which appears to have mattered most, whether or not they regularly co-published. Robert and Marie Connor Leighton stopped publishing together by the 1900s; Marie became one of England’s most celebrated authors of sensation fiction while Robert wrote boys' adventure stories. But they still wrote at the same table in their joint study and wandered together around St John’s Wood, London, ‘simmering’ with ideas.Footnote 35 Kathrene Pinkerton stressed her collaboration with Robert ‘was more so’ after they stopped writing together: ‘Two separate jobs, two separate names and a tremendous interest in the other’s job brought a far greater sharing than in the early days when we’d signed together. We had all the joy of a common project and none of the irritation of having to convince the other fellow.’Footnote 36 The Pinkertons’ and Leightons’ pivot to living as literary couples rather than formally collaborating is reflective of the growth of dual-working couples who, although not working on exactly the same projects, were still effectively collaborators as they deviated from the middle-class ideal of marriage with husband as breadwinner and wife as homemaker. As the Literary World commented in 1905: ‘It is remarkable how many wives of literary men are themselves literary.’Footnote 37
Collaborative marriages can be found across writing cultures – as editors, translators, and scholars – but couples regularly co-published on popular, social themes. Travel writing held obvious benefits, providing companionship on adventures and respectability for women. Some prioritized this genre, such as mountaineers and explorers Fanny Bullock Workman (1859–1925) and William Hunter Workman (1847–1937), and Martin (1884–1937) and Osa Johnson (1894–1953, née Leighty). For others, who primarily identified as ‘writers’, travel writing was one of many topics they focused on. Altogether, they played a significant role in expanding modern literature through their accessible writing styles, blurring of genres, and novel topics. Alice and Claude Askew alone collaborated on dozens of genre-spanning works. Their most famous novel was the jingoistic The Shulamite (1904), but they also co-authored stories about Aylmer Vance, occult investigator, as well as becoming ‘Special Correspondents’ for the British Daily Express – and later writing a book – about their relief work in Serbia during the Great War.Footnote 38 A. M. and C. N. Williamson’s publications spanned manifold genres, including detective, ghost, spy, and sensational exposes, but they were best known for their semi-autobiographical ‘motorcar romance novels’, such as The lightning conductor (1902), which had sold over a million copies by 1914. It captivated readers with its epistolary form, humorous love story, incognito cross-class relationships, and adventures on ‘the Continent’ in the newly invented motorcar.Footnote 39
It is impossible to ever fully measure the ‘cultural throw’ of published works on readers, whose responses are rarely documented, but this outpouring of publications by married collaborators is testament to the public interest in such works.Footnote 40 Articles and serials featured in newspapers, literary journals, lifestyle papers, and the women’s press in countries ranging from New Zealand to India.Footnote 41 Their novels appeared in cheap editions and colonial series and were translated into dozens of languages.Footnote 42 ‘Married books’ were consistently mentioned in bestseller lists and ‘Recommended Read’ sections: in a 1905 competition in the New York Globe (which received 55,584 votes) the Castles were listed as in the top twelve most popular authors of the past two years.Footnote 43 Many publications were turned into theatre productions, and later screenplays and films, facilitating public engagement well into the twentieth century.Footnote 44
Press reports assumed women would be voracious readers of such material. In 1925, the Australian Woman’s Mirror declared: ‘What woman has not read the cheerful, well-written books of Coralie Stanton and Heath Hosken?’ The journalist continued: ‘the stories of Agnes and Egerton Castle are equally well-known to women readers of fiction’, as were C. N. and A. M. Williamson, who had ‘for many years flooded the literary market place’. But the ‘average reader’ was often mentioned: the Castles’ romances were ‘of the type that is hungrily devoured by the average reader, and will go on selling till Doomsday’.Footnote 45 Couples were regularly discussed in approving terms – if as a guilty pleasure – by literary critics as well. The Westminster Gazette detailed how, although the Williamsons’ books had ‘firmly established’ their ‘popularity with a large public’, the ‘literary critic has at times protested on high artistic grounds’. Still, ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and these two authors have contrived to strike an acceptable compromise’.Footnote 46 Elsewhere, The Times of India informed readers the Williamsons were ‘the best sellers of the day’, while the Brisbane Daily Mail described the Askews as ‘the most successful collaborators in modern fiction’.Footnote 47 As is evident here, it was their marriages, not simply their publications, which were held up as a discursive focal point.
II
By 1900, a prominent, celebratory cultural discourse had emerged heralding the growth and rewarding nature of ‘modern’, collaborative, literary marriages, which was circulated to readers across the English-speaking world and amongst creative, literary networks alike. Initially disseminated within the forewords and pages of books co-published by couples, this framing was reinforced and expanded across press cultures by editors, journalists, and photographers. In the process of projecting an idealized version of these marriages to readers – which enabled ‘popular’ collaborators to reach unprecedented public status, and, unusually, foregrounded the intellectual capacities of wives as equal to their husbands – this discourse helped develop wider belief in the potential benefits of dual-working and companionate marriages in modern society.
Couples regularly offered brief, idealized glimpses of their relationships in their works, foregrounding their harmonious, combined literary efforts and the joy with which their marital lives were suffused as a result. Whatever the book’s content, the front matter – acknowledgement pages, dedications, prefaces – encouraged readers to reflect on these themes. In Sketches awheel in modern Iberia (1897), co-authored by Fanny and William Hunter Workman, they each dedicated the ‘portion’ they had written to the other.Footnote 48 Elizabeth Williams Champney (1850–1922) dedicated The romance of the feudal châteaux (1904) to her husband James Wells Champney (1843–1903), who illustrated her books and ‘made all my privileges possible…[and to whom] this book, the gathering of a happy life, is dedicated’.Footnote 49 Ernest Seton Thompson (1860–1946) included a ‘Notes for Readers’ section in Wild animals I have known (1898), where he stressed that Grace Gallatin Seton Thompson (1872–1959), listed simply as illustrator on the title page, had played a more integral role; ‘This book was made by my wife…she chiefly is responsible for designs of cover, title page, and general make-up. Thanks are due to her also for the literary revision, and for the mechanical labor of seeing the book through the press.’Footnote 50 A. M. Williamson reached out directly ‘To the Kind People Who Read Our Books’ in the Preface to The brightener (1921), published after C. N. Williamson’s death. Responding to considerable intrigue about whether she would keep writing, she explained she was keeping the ‘“firm name”…because I feel very strongly that he helps me with the work even more than he was able to do in this world…Dear People who read this, I hope that you will wish to see the initials “C. N.” with those of A. M. Williamson.’Footnote 51
Within the book proper, non-fiction, especially travel writing, offered the most opportunities to reinforce this message.Footnote 52 The Pennells, Boyds, Askews, Castles, and others such as artists and co-authors Jan (1882–1944) and Cora Gordon (1879–1950, née Turner), and Troy (1871–1938) and Margaret West Kinney (1872–1952), all habitually used the plural first person pronoun ‘we’, which reiterated their position as a unified force, discouraging readers – and future researchers – from attempting to separate out individual contributions. Even Our stolen summer: the record of a roundabout tour (1900), which listed Mary Boyd (1860–1937, née Kirkwood) as author and A. S. Boyd (1854–1930) as illustrator, was written from dual perspective.Footnote 53 Louise Closser Hale (1872–1933), who did write as ‘I’, while Walter (1869–1917) illustrated their books, emphasized her writing was shaped by them both, offering readers of We discover New England (1915) examples such as, ‘he is saying now, looking over my shoulder, if I am going to spend so much time on ourselves and so little on the route and the historical interest along the way no one will want the book anyway’.Footnote 54
The declaration that they were dwelling too much on their relationships was common, part of an attempt to encourage readers to believe that by reading these works they could gain unique access into the ‘private’ lives of married collaborators, during an era when there was rising fascination with confessional accounts and celebrity cultures. Couples adopted an informal, confiding tone to foster this illusion of familiarity and authenticity. Talking openly about money difficulties – usually framed around how they had overcome these – was a frequent feature, as couples celebrated their supposedly self-made statuses with readers as simultaneously relatable and aspirational content. The Williamsons’ The lightning conductor, ostensibly fictional, was ‘really a story of our troubles on such a trip and the dilemma we got into when out of funds’.Footnote 55 It was also usual for collaborators to state that their writing – whether non-fiction or fiction – was drawn from ‘real life’ experiences; the Askews’ ‘life in Society in London’ apparently ‘supplie[d] them with invaluable experience for novel-writing’.Footnote 56
But despite this declaration readers would gain unprecedented access to their lives by buying their works; married collaborators, in fact, rarely offered personal details, let alone discussed what must have been their frenetic professional and domestic lives, travelling the world, writing a steady stream of articles and books, liaising with editors and publishers, and often having several children. Instead, they portrayed themselves as ‘ordinary’ middle-class married couples in ways which at times were laughable. The Castles, for instance, described themselves in A little house in war time (1915), a non-fictional account of their domestic life at their manor house, complete with tennis court, in Surrey, England, as ‘the true record of the everyday life of an average family’.Footnote 57 This emphasis on their ordinary, ‘average’ marriages, rather than their unusual collaborative work, was shaped by the genres they worked in and the audiences they wished to attract, and was likely to alleviate concerns about their dual-working statuses. Yet this approach facilitated the creation of a light-hearted but contemplative space where readers could inhabit their adventures and potentially feel a longing for similarly fulfilling, exciting relationships of their own.
Moreover, there was a trend within travel writing of wives working as the authors and husbands as the illustrators, and here wives threaded subtle reminders about the power they held. Having laid the groundwork of portraying themselves as unexceptional, but very happy, couples, they projected a message to readers that marital harmony was aided by both in the marriage pursuing satisfying intellectual, creative projects, and that wives, in particular, should expect this. Marital tensions were occasionally alluded to, but this was probably to further reassure readers of their relatability. The examples were discussed in an upbeat tone as resolvable, mirroring the ‘happy endings’ of their fiction. In We discover the Old Dominion (1916) Louise Closser Hale nonchalantly told readers her husband ‘has got to be in it, but I shall have to treat him with more respect’. Apparently, ‘It is his claim that I have not been sufficiently formal in writing of him, and he has been upheld by this in a number of letters that have come to me…reproachful in their tone as to my treatment of a husband.’ She believed Walter had written these letters himself, but – as ever using humour to deflect tension – continued ‘since he feels so keenly about it I shall endeavour to handle him with care. I shall even call him the Illustrator now and then so that you won’t think he was the chauffeur.’Footnote 58 By offering such snippets, Hale reiterated her confidence about the authority she held and offered a hierarchical nod to Walter’s role as ‘Illustrator’, potentially even as chauffeur, in contrast to her position as main narrator. As such, although obviously the majority of readers did not have such relationships, married collaborators fortified the growing expectations regarding compatibility and shared interests within marriage as a key element in obtaining marital success.
Alongside these glossed representations within their own publications, there were considerable efforts across the anglophone press to cultivate reader interest with exuberant discussions of couples such as the Askews, Castles, and Williamsons, which further helped turn them into household names. Aware of the need to do things differently in a saturated marketplace, collaborators, editors, and journalists used a variety of inventive techniques to sell these marriages to the world. The Williamsons ‘accomplish[ed] the unique feat of interviewing each other’ for the Idler in 1904, with A. M. Williamson writing: ‘I naturally felt somewhat nervous and excited in being asked by the editor…to interview a person who seemed to me so important in the scheme of the universe as Mr C. N. Williamson.’Footnote 59 The Daily Mirror advertised a new serial by the Askews by positioning two tiny photographs of Alice and Claude – making one pick up the paper for closer inspection – on each side of the title on the front page (Figure 1).Footnote 60 By 1900, portrait photographs were used with increasing regularity in advertisements, interviews, and as stand-alone visual reminders, to promote married collaborators as well as their books. Some photographs primarily asserted couples’ elite, fashionable statuses (Figure 2) while others made greater efforts to foreground the intellectual nature of their partnerships by depicting the posed collaborating couple thoughtfully considering their work together (Figures 3 and 4).
Claude and Alice Askew, Daily Mirror, 24 Feb. 1906, front page.
Agnes and Egerton Castle, The Book Buyer, 21 (1900), p. 483.
C. N. and A. M. Williamson, Sphere, 30 May 1914, p. 278. © Illustrated London News Ltd. / Mary Evans.
Walter and Louise Closser Hale, ‘Famous husbands and wives: some mates and helpmates, both of whom do the world’s work’, Green Book, Nov. 1916, p. 938.
Despite the suggestion that by buying these papers you could find out new details about your favourite collaborators, the content of articles and interviews was as formulaic as acknowledgement pages and travel writing. But this was where their power lay, as it furthered the homogeneous, idealized script being proffered to readers. Scholars have argued that press suspicion led to a decline in literary collaborations by the 1890s, but this commentary differed noticeably for married partners.Footnote 61 Social belief in the permanency of marriage bolstered the authenticity of couples in contrast to same-gender collaborators who were plagued by the view they were motivated by money making, faddish trend, or sexual deviancy.Footnote 62 By the 1900s, journalists were emphasizing that collaborating within loving marriages offered unique opportunities to find professional ‘success’, which in turn enriched their personal relationships due to the harmonious intellectual satisfaction these partnerships apparently offered. Current Literature was one of many to argue: ‘It is, indeed, difficult to imagine a more ideal literary collaboration than that of man and wife.’Footnote 63
In these public projections, there was a remarkable lack of gendered hierarchies when discussing respective intellectual contributions. Of course, couples were publishing ‘popular’ works and were not working within more hierarchical scholarly, ‘literary’, or ‘high art’ contexts, but it is significant they were presented to mass audiences as having equal intellect and being dual participants in their professional projects: both ‘brilliant writers’ with ‘fertile brains’.Footnote 64 Journalists told readers it was impossible to work out who had written which section of their works due to this cerebral compatibility; ‘Closely allied as Mr and Mrs Egerton Castle are intellectually, it is well known to the many readers of their books that it is impossible to detect the line of cleavage in their collaboration.’Footnote 65 The Askews' marriage, meanwhile, had ‘united’ two individuals whose ‘tastes were so strikingly similar’ literary success was guaranteed.Footnote 66 Couples repeated such framing. Egerton Castle told the Brooklyn Daily Eagle that their writing, whether for novel or play, was an ‘unfailing source of intellectual enjoyment’, and a task they divided equally: ‘in our case the collaboration is not the sort…that the rough work is the task of one, and the literary polishing, such as it be, the case of the other’. They would ‘write up the scenes…exactly as the fancy divides’ before editing and polishing the final text together.Footnote 67 The Askews’ ‘singularly successful’ collaboration was achieved similarly: ‘If the idea is Mrs Askew’s she writes the first part, and tells her husband how the second part should be treated. The result is perfect harmony, and the two styles blend so well as to defy detection by the shrewdest judge.’Footnote 68 These evocations of harmonious and equal contributions, likely emphasized as a novel, marketing technique, meant readers were encouraged to consider these dual-working relationships throughout the reading process.
Articles claimed to offer ever further ‘behind the scenes’ glimpses by discussing the hybrid domestic workspaces of the most successful married collaborators. In actuality, what was offered was again a highly romanticized snapshot, which capitalized on the established societal obsession with upper-middle-class domestic life, and emergence of the popular new mode of interviewing notable personalities ‘At Home’. But it also simultaneously demonstrated the supposed ease with which dual-working households could function, and indeed the heightened culture and wholesome nature of married literary homes.Footnote 69 For the San Francisco Call, what was most interesting about the home of John Coulson Kernahan (1858–1943) and Jeanie Gwynne Bettany Kernahan (1857–1941), who often published as ‘Mrs Coulson Kernahan’, were their matching garden ‘workshops’, ‘two small rustic huts, as alike as two peas’. Each was set up as a ‘den’, with writing materials, books, and heating apparatus: ‘Thus the literary couple are able to work, summer and winter alike, within a few feet of each other, and yet be respectively as undisturbed as if they were miles apart.’Footnote 70 Such comments were common: one 1904 article revealed Mary and A. S. Boyd’s London home had a shared ‘workroom’ where ‘the one plies his busy pencil and the other [a] leisurely pen’. And yet the house retained its function as a venue for respectable middle-class socialization: it was ‘well known to…interesting folk in literary and artistic circles’.Footnote 71 The Boyds later moved to Takapuna, New Zealand, and Mary’s home library was filled with an ‘amazing collection of first editions…signed by the authors’, a point presented as indicative of their ‘many literary friendships’ with peers including Rudyard Kipling and Bret Harte.Footnote 72
Such examples reveal the significance of the ‘marital household’ in enabling couples to engrain themselves within interconnected, influential circles which bypassed the solely literary.Footnote 73 At the Askews’ home, ‘Distinguished men and women gathered round…Authors, publishers, members of Parliament, actors, musicians’ were all ‘welcomed’, while the Williamsons entertained a similar array of prestigious guests, including David Lloyd George, then chancellor of the exchequer, and economist J. M. Keynes.Footnote 74 Public audiences were being offered idealized snapshots of ‘modern’ collaborating couples reframing life around the professional needs of both within the household, yet remaining embedded in appropriate, cultured, and fundamentally domestic networks of middle-class and elite sociability.
As well as the enthusiastic discussions about specific marriages, articles began to introduce married collaborators as a distinct cultural phenomenon, offering potted histories and lists of ‘successful’ couples (Figure 5). Such pieces featured amidst an outpouring of, usually fictional, articles, stories, and theatre and film productions about creative marital collaborations. Many satirized the comical ‘scrapes’ of couples desperately trying to find employment together, offering a rare glimpse of the difficulties couples active in the wider hinterland of the literary world faced. Our flat (1889), a hugely popular farce-comedy by ‘Mrs H. Musgrave’, staged in England and the United States, detailed the chaotic home life of a couple ‘living from hand to mouth in a London flat, husband and wife alike striving hard to get a foothold in the literary sphere'.Footnote 75 Others poked fun at the perceived naivety of the increasing numbers of young couples engaging in marital collaborations.Footnote 76 A. A. Milne’s (1882–1956) story ‘The literary partnership’ (1905) featured Cecil who ‘earned a precarious living by writing for the papers’ and his cousin Maud who was having to ‘give up painting. It’s too expensive’, before they decided to go into partnership so they could ‘write and draw beautiful stories all day’. Reliant on attracting reader interest, however, they relentlessly produced stories blurring together ‘hunting in East Africa’ with ‘happily ever after’ romances (‘it’s all the public seem to want’).Footnote 77 Milne ended the story writing: ‘There could only be one end’ to the partnership. They married, honeymooned around the world and then continued publishing ‘desperate stories of adventure in the Rockies’.Footnote 78 Elsewhere, journalists openly warned readers against falling for the rose-tinted portrayal of collaborative marriages.Footnote 79 Hearth and Home, directly responding to Besant’s piece which opened this article, wrote disapprovingly of his efforts to provide ‘delicious recipes for the making of books’ to ‘foolish’ men, and cautioned women who might be tempted to collaborate simply because they were ‘dreaming domestically of a sweet dual life crowned with orange blossoms throned by the glowing hearth in a snug home’.Footnote 80 Altogether, these accounts emphasize the extent to which a prominent dialogue around marital creative collaboration had permeated literary and popular cultures alike.
‘Wedded collaborators’, Scrap Book, July 1907, p. 3.
III
In 1947, artist Clare Leighton (1898–1989) published Tempestuous petticoats: the story of an invincible Edwardian, a sardonic account of her childhood with Robert and Marie Connor Leighton. In one vignette, Clare described her mother as informing her: ‘A woman is meant for marriage, and once she is married she has lost all chance to pursue her career.’ Then, ‘without a glance at Father who was idly drawing a little fishing boat’ she turned to her secretary to carry on ‘dictating the instalment of one of her serial stories which was to feed and clothe the three children’. Marie also quipped that women did not need a formal education, although she did think they should have the vote – even endorsing militant action.Footnote 81 Such gendered and contradictory remarks were routine for ‘pen partners’ who co-published popular works. Alice Askew, despite engaging in an ostensibly progressive, dual-working marriage, justified her anti-suffrage views by arguing women should be grateful, as ‘Men have ploughed the earth, built cities, and sailed the seas, and done much for the sex physically prevented from taking their full share of life’s burdens.’ She concluded by asserting ‘nor should I write in collaboration with my husband if I believed in feminine independence’.Footnote 82 Embedded in a competitive, capitalist society, and despite (or because of) their unusual lives, journalists and ‘popular’ married couples often laced their commentaries with this type of framing.
Such regressive and essentialized gendered discourse was similarly echoed within popular press accounts evoking the unique potential of the most celebrated married partnerships. While journalists emphasized the compatible cerebral intellect of married collaborators, they still tended to stress their distinctive ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ perspectives to justify these unions. The St Andrews Citizen told readers in 1905: ‘The chief living example of husband and wife as collaborators is that binary star, “Egerton and Agnes Castle.”’Footnote 83 The Pall Mall Gazette declared ‘a man’s or woman’s view of the world is only impartial – which suggests that what is lacking can be supplied by the complementary opposite. This, it is shown, is a complete justification of the collaboration of literary married people.’Footnote 84
Furthermore, although their published works notably prioritized women characters, the most popular collaborators often encouraged readers to adhere to traditional gendered roles, and not to fall for ‘modern’ ideas about the capacity for women in particular to adopt new forms of living. Coralie Stanton and Heath Hosken’s 1908 Daily Mirror serial ‘The beaten track’, for instance, introduced readers to ‘several types of women, living, breathing characters – women any of our readers may meet today, or tomorrow, or have met yesterday’. It included ‘the proprietress of a typical Kensington boarding house, widowed, well-connected, driven by poverty to enter the arena of bread-winners’ and ‘the heroine, Ann Batchelar…the type of splendid, independent English girlhood that is more and more frequently met with, the woman who works, but sacrifices none of her womanhood, and is still potently attractive to men’. The story even featured a ‘famous woman author whose husband cannot earn a tenth as much as she does, and whose married life is nearly shipwrecked for that reason’. In advertisements drumming up interest for the serial, readers were asked: ‘Can a woman ever find happiness in this world, if she forsakes the beaten track?’Footnote 85 Likewise, the Askews' short story, ‘The backsliding of Doreen’, published simultaneously in Derbyshire and Bulawayo, focused on Doreen, a highly intelligent ‘Girton girl’ and ardent suffrage campaigner who was determined to have a literary career writing about social issues. Yet Doreen confided in readers that in her desire to have a ‘rich full life of work’ she had failed to prioritize love, ‘the glory of a woman’s life’. To achieve this, she gave up her professional ambitions for a ‘strong and protecting’ man who ‘hated, and that with his whole soul’ Doreen’s ‘modern independence of thought’. In marrying him, she ‘fell from grace’ from her ‘fellow workers’ but came ‘into the true kingdom of woman’.Footnote 86
Such works positioned marriage and family as the pinnacle of a woman’s existence, ‘the beaten track’ to which readers ought to stick. By offering such framings, collaborators reflected the world readers lived in and appealed because they did not simply present women and working-class figures as victims or ignore them. Instead, they focused on a relatable topic – whether or not to marry – which permeated many readers’ lives, intervening to exalt the idea that women needed to retain their ‘womanhood’ and be ‘attractive’ to men, whether at work or when married, and lambasting the idea of divorce.Footnote 87 They portrayed it as a woman’s responsibility to ameliorate the discordance work could bring to the marital home. In her memoir, A. M. Williamson even blamed herself for her husband’s affair, writing that when she had offered him more attention and focused less on work, their marital issues had disappeared.Footnote 88 Threaded through this, couples promoted a highly imperialistic view, littered with racist character types and articulating the unsuitability of inter-racial marriages.Footnote 89
Their non-fictional writings frequently had a distinctly classed element which encouraged working-class and lower-middle-class women, in particular, to stoically take pleasure in their gendered marital and domestic duties. The Castles told readers that intellectual women had a key role to play in dampening working-class women’s aspirations:
The first task, therefore, of the woman thinker is to drag her own sex out of the mire in which it is disporting itself in the mad belief that it is something delectable…We want the working mother’s life to be made happy; but she should be encouraged to find her happiness in her home, and discouraged to seek it in the cinema and the dancing hall.Footnote 90
Elsewhere, they discussed the harmful impact of the ‘penny novelette’ and the ‘spread of emancipation and education’.Footnote 91 Such examples show the hypocrisy of their claims, as the Castles, like other popular collaborators, were producing much of the content (penny novels, plays, films) that diverse women audiences across the English-speaking world were engaging with. As their reputations relied on being perceived to be exceptional, celebrity figures, this clearly fed into their growing unease at the attempts being made by working- and lower-middle-class women to – like themselves – fight for more fulfilment in their own personal and working lives.
Collaborating wives also regularly positioned themselves as different from ‘other women’ in terms of their capabilities. Battling against the belief that middle-class women were more likely to get sick from the strain of work, Marie Connor Leighton told her daughter,
Just because I’m a married woman people expect me to feel faint and tired at times. I remember how worried the editors were whenever I was in a certain condition. But Lord Northcliffe [famed editor of the Daily Mail] put them in their place. ‘Nonsense’, he told them. ‘Mrs Leighton could go on just the same even if she were about to give birth to triplets.’
Revelling in her ability ‘to get my heroine married to my hero just as the first labor pains were beginning’, she supposedly went so far as to say ‘It’s all nonsense – this morning sickness and such. Leave that to the women with no work to do.’Footnote 92 Elsewhere, ‘Mrs Askew’ would ‘simmer…over her plots in the morning’ before emerging in the evening ‘perfectly dressed, glowing with beauty, vivacious as a schoolgirl’, ‘ready for social enjoyments’.Footnote 93 Such rhetoric encouraged the belief that couples were successful due to their heightened capabilities alone, when they relied on the extensive labour of typists, secretaries, drivers, domestic servants, and familial and friendship networks.Footnote 94 Collaborating couples were portrayed as exemplifying the widespread liberal belief in the importance of ‘self-help’ and individual hard work in achieving success, although this was here repackaged to foreground the capabilities of ‘exceptional’ marital literary collaborators.Footnote 95
Proclamations such as these reveal the contradiction and tension between the progressive example which marital literary collaboration set, which was being publicized to readers, and the regressive, exclusionary, and essentialist messages they communicated. The second paradox here is that couples were positioned both as experiencing the same dilemmas as their readers and as simultaneously exceptional. Editors of popular publications realized that intrigue about these unusual marriages – often those of creatives within their own nepotistic networks – would sell their papers. This led to the exceptional, unique nature of certain marriages being over-exaggerated. This was, consciously or unconsciously, intended to soothe the anxieties of potentially conservative readerships that these dual-working couples were not emblematic of a wider shift away from traditional gender ideologies. This became especially important by the dawn of the twentieth century, with the heightened anxieties about divorce and ‘the woman question’, and as ‘modern’ creative marriages more generally came under suspicion of greater propensity to end in divorce or the ‘emasculation’ of the male breadwinner.Footnote 96 Instead, the presentation of popular co-authors as harmoniously married offered a reassuring sense of stability and traditionalism. They could be fêted as evidence of the beneficial force couples from white middle-class Anglo-American backgrounds could play in modern society, ideally placed to do ‘the world’s work’ together, and marketed as such across diverse imperial and English-speaking contexts, including in India, Australia, and New Zealand.Footnote 97 As such, although married collaborators offered a rare new model which showcased middle-class women competently managing fulfilling professional and domestic lives – and emphasized the benefits of companionate and dual-working marriages for husbands and wider society – the most ‘popular’ couples still often propelled forward gendered, classed, racialized, and nationalistic ideas which regressively shaped social norms and modes of behaviour on the global stage well into the twentieth century.
In 1996, journalist Julia Llewellyn Smith wrote an article for the Irish Independent about the rise of the ‘power couple’. The article is strikingly similar to Cordova’s 1912 piece, but here the 1980s and 1990s were positioned as the key decades in the modern era when ‘successful men began to discover the delights of the power spouse, a wife whose career was as brilliant, if not more dazzling, than his’. These ‘dynamic duos’ were ‘suddenly as ubiquitous as Filofaxes’, together navigating not simply ‘who would ferry the children to ballet, but whose turn it was to appear on Question Time’. Llewellyn Smith also discussed the importance of a carefully projected ‘wholesome domesticity’ in bolstering their reputations, offering the example of Tony Blair, then leader of the Labour party, and his wife, barrister Cherie Booth, whose ostensibly equitable marital relationship solidified ‘Blair’s right-on, new man credentials’.Footnote 98
This article has revealed that such attempts were not as new as they were portrayed to have been in the late twentieth century. At different moments since the late nineteenth century, certain dual-working middle-class couples were positioned as evidence of this remarkable ‘new’ phenomenon, be this the 1910s, 1930s, or 1980s. They were portrayed as novel to that specific historical moment, as supposedly demonstrative of the modernity and progressiveness of that era – or that nation – rather than becoming an increasingly established and engrained presence within professional, creative, and ‘elite’ global society. The frequent reprinting of old articles as content filler fed into this perspective. One enthusiastic article about the Askews (‘There are few readers of periodicals who do not know the names of these novelists’) was reprinted over a dozen times between the 1910s and 1940s in local Australian newspapers, continuing long after their death in the Great War, portraying this exceptional couple as still living and working together at their ‘charming home’ in southern England.Footnote 99 As a result of the ephemeral nature of the formats in which these discourses of ‘exceptional’ collaborating couples most often appeared – daily newspapers and cheap paperbacks – the average reader, across all these periods, has not been able to perceive this thread as the long-standing phenomenon it constitutes.
The elevated reputation of these couples relied on being viewed as more unusual than they actually were. Couples, and the press, constructed the idea they were exceptional in their intellectual partnerships, which enabled their ‘modern’ collaborative working lives to be tolerated and even extolled. As part of this, such couples contributed to the formalization of a pervasive professional, creative culture where marital status played a significant role in accruing and maintaining social status, for instance through positioning the prestigious ‘married literary home’ as a central node for network building and socialization. This would have generated considerable difficulties for the many unmarried professional women and men not working from within such partnerships.Footnote 100 Analysing ‘successful’ figures then, whom historians might dismiss due to the perception they offer little insight beyond their own privileged lives, fleshes out the ways individuals pioneering new forms of living and working have become implicated in maintaining and policing exclusionary social hierarchies at specific historical moments, as part of a desire to achieve their own personal and familial ‘success’ within capitalist, patriarchal society.
It is also important to reflect on what the huge appetite for such writings says about the attitudes of ‘ordinary people’ during this era. As Christine Grandy has emphasized, more efforts need to be dedicated towards examining ‘the unrelenting, often conservative, and silent appetite’ for topics pertaining to ‘monarchy, romances, westerns, detective stories, empire films, and ever-present colonial reveries in all forms’.Footnote 101 Collaborating couples were at the forefront of producing such materials for a seemingly very receptive international audience. Despite this, we should avoid projecting an overly unitary perspective onto mass readerships; the engagement of ‘ordinary readers’ in such cultures did not necessarily signify a unified political perspective or worldview. Readers instead likely had a wide range of responses. Indeed, I contend that the very paradoxes and contradictions in the rhetoric around popular literary couples fostered an imaginative space where mass audiences across the English-speaking world could self-actualize new perspectives about ‘modern’ and companionate marriages, gender roles, and work, and which encouraged readers to hope and push for more equitable relationships and futures for themselves.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the organizers of the ‘Long Nineteenth-Century Seminar’ at the University of Oxford and the ‘School of Humanities and Heritage Research Seminar’ at the University of Lincoln for inviting me to speak about this project, and to the attendees for offering helpful feedback. A special thank you to Simon Thomas Parsons for his myriad helpful suggestions, especially while in Greece.
Funding statement
With thanks to the BA/Leverhulme for a ‘Small Research Grant’ (SRG\171113) which helped me undertake the research for this article.
Open access
