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  • Constance Maynard’s Passions: Religion, Sexuality, and an English Educational Pioneer, 1849–1935 by Pauline A. Phipps
  • Laura Green (bio)
Constance Maynard’s Passions: Religion, Sexuality, and an English Educational Pioneer, 1849–1935, by Pauline A. Phipps; pp. x + 283. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015, $65.00.

Constance Maynard (1849–1935) is having a moment of posthumous publicity that she would likely have embraced. The devoutly Evangelical, Girton-educated founder of Westfield College for women—a Christian and missionary-oriented institution that was also the first to train women for the degrees of the University of London—left behind a rich and carefully preserved archive. Maynard willed to five literary executors close to one thousand pages of unpublished autobiography composed in neat cursive hand; over seventy volumes of diaries, letters, and miscellaneous publications, including book-length poems; a biography; and religious tracts. These materials occupy nineteen boxes at Queen Mary, University of London (with which Westfield merged in 1989), and the university has recently digitized and made freely available both the manuscript of the autobiography and Maynard’s diaries recording her spiritual life.

Beginning with Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (1985), Martha Vicinus’s groundbreaking study of the mid- and late-Victorian communities of women who created new professional identities, this archive has been mined by feminist historians following the tracks of the “passions” (to adopt Pauline Phipps’s apt word) of Maynard’s long life: the education of women, an intense and difficult devotion to a stringent Evangelical theology, and equally intense and difficult emotional involvements with other women. Recently, the Journal of Women’s History devoted a special issue [End Page 548] to Maynard; Phipps, a historian and contributor to that issue, has now written the first contemporary biography of Maynard.

In Constance Maynard’s Passions: Religion, Sexuality, and an English Educational Pioneer, 1849–1935, Phipps takes what she calls a “queer approach” to the Maynard archive, reading her vocabulary of faith, her career ambitions, and her same-sex desire as mutually sustaining (22). A biography published in 1949 by Maynard’s former student, Catherine B. Firth, acknowledged Maynard’s relationships with colleagues and students, but suppressed the diaries’ frank representations of same-sex emotional and physical intimacy. Vicinus, for whom Maynard is exemplary of the challenges middle- and upper-middle-class Victorian women faced in developing norms for work and community outside of conventional domesticity, fully quotes Maynard’s records of kisses and caresses but does not explicitly claim her as a figure for lesbian history. Phipps, however, is interested in chronicling the development of what she calls Maynard’s “same-sex sexual self-consciousness,” and particularly in the ways in which her religious beliefs enabled, as well as restricted, the expression of that consciousness (16).

As Phipps explains her “queer approach to Maynard’s voice,” it demonstrates “the need to recognize elusive desires and behaviours that did not necessarily create stigmatized identities” (22). As she notes, “past individuals may not have been fully able or willing to conceptualize their behaviour, particularly if they were devout or lived during an era on the brink of cultural change” (22). She reminds readers that “a queer approach to Victorian female friendship” should “warn us against reifying and projecting current hetero and homosexual identities onto the past” (14). In her attention to Maynard’s self-awareness within her own cultural discourses, and in recognizing that the development of same-sex desires and identities does not follow a singular trajectory from stigma to normative status, Phipps avoids such projection, extending the recent work of scholars of gender and sexuality such as Vicinus, in Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928 (2004), Sharon Marcus, in Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (2007), and Laura Doan, in Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experiences of Modern War (2013). However, in framing Maynard as not having been “fully able or willing to conceptualize [her] behaviour”—rather than as drawing on conceptualizations different from our own—she sometimes verges on precisely the kind of presentism that she pronounces against.

To be fair to Phipps, she is contending with a life narrative that...

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